‘Stardust Demon’ – Adorable Creatures Puzzling Through Planets

Stardust Demon delves deep into an array of strange alien worlds, meeting goofy creatures and blasting wild demons along the way.

A spaceship has crash landed in your neck of the universe, causing all kinds of trouble in your neighborhood and kicking off a long adventure that will take you through all kinds of different planets. On these differing worlds, you’ll have to make use of your neat abilities to figure your way through environmental puzzles whenever you’re not blasting oddball beasts. Expect to carefully bounce beams around rooms, pogo hop your way through spiky corridors, and use teleportation abilities to skulk about and find hard-to-reach goodies.

It all makes for a solid action/exploration game that definitely reminds me of Cave Story, but as this is a game from the creators of Mibibli’s Quest, it’s also got a surreal feeling in its locations and characters (all of whom are charming or memorable in their own way). A great deal of the joy in this game just comes from finding new people and places. While I highly enjoyed the action in the game (battling a monster that attacks you with the letters in the word “roar” had me chuckling), this game really rewards you for just taking the journey through it. Even your character’s walk cycle looks adorable and makes meandering around worlds pleasant all on its own.

Stardust Demon genuinely feels packed with fun things to find, and not just from its secrets. It’s in every step you make on a new planet, running into all kinds of creative monsters, watching them move around, and meeting new characters that this game really shines. Great puzzles and action, like I said, but this is a world I was just happy to explore and get to know all on its own.

Stardust Demon is available now on itch.io and Steam.

About The Author

Joel Couture

Joel has been covering indie games for various sites including IndieGames.com, Siliconera, Gamasutra, Warp Door, CG Magazine, and more over the past seven years, and has written book-length studies on Undertale and P.T.. Joel is constantly on the lookout for digital experiences that push the boundaries of what games can be, and seeks to delve into the creative process, meanings, and emotion labor that goes into the work of artists worldwide.