Dream of the Star Haven is currently in early access and is free to play. As far as I can see, it will continue to be free even after it exits early access. If I’m honest, this has been sitting in my Steam library for about a month and I’m glad that I finally got the chance to sit down and play it.
Since it’s in early access, I won’t be giving it a score or talking about it in my usual format. So, today is all about the vibes and the feels. Dream of the Star Haven is an interesting first-person platformer that lets you explore floating islands to collect various items. You’ll encounter some puzzle-like themes and light combat.
Let’s start from the beginning though. When you boot up the game, you’re given three mode options: easy, adventurer, and hard.
In easy mode, you won’t die or lose progress. You’ll still be put back at the beginning of the level and have a hit bar for the scant number of enemies. But, it’s “no harm, no foul” if you lose.
In adventurer mode, you will lose your items and have to start back at the beginning of the level from scratch.
And, hard mode is, obviously, hard. This mode not only strips you of your items and progress, but you lose ALL of your progress and have to restart the entire game.
Boing, boing!
While I’ll never use hard mode and likely won’t give adventurer mode the time of day, I enjoy the fact that they’re there. It helps to bring in a wider range of players for the game and I feel like there’s some opportunity in Dream of the Star Haven for the speedrunning community.
Once you’re in the game, you may notice some issues with motion sickness. Fortunately, there is a function in the settings that you can turn on to combat that. I was the person who got motion sickness from Super Mario Galaxy. So, I expected to suffer a bit here and didn’t have any issues. So, hopefully, it won’t upset most people’s equilibrium.
Before I get into how to play and what I thought of it, I want to touch a little bit on the graphics and sound really quickly. As far as music goes, it’s basic elevator music that you can take or leave. And the sounds are mostly just footsteps and the sounds enemies make. There’s not much to write home about.
When it comes to the art, it’s nothing mindblowing. But, I enjoyed the way that the islands were designed and found something interesting in the enemies that were chosen. Since it’s all first person, you don’t really have more than just the environment around you to see.
Now, in terms of the game, it’ll leave your limbs feeling a bit like jelly at the end from the vibration. It’s not all the time. But, when you land – and you will be landing a lot – it will buzz the controller. You won’t have to deal with this if you play with a mouse and keyboard.
Look, Ma, no hands!
You, as a character, are on a floating island with a bunch of similar islands floating above and below you. You can access them by falling down or jumping up. When jumping, you can double and even triple jump up to platforms. The sky is the limit… unless you fall.
Scattered around the islands are various items to collect. Some of them are hidden and some of them require challenges to be completed before they appear. I’ll get into that later, let’s talk about the items first.
The most notable items are the crystals, known as stars. There are several scattered around and they’re used to power your scanner. Once it has power, you can use it to see where key objects are hidden.
Aside from the crystals, you can find starbursts and keys. The starbursts require you to complete challenges such as jumping through rings that are circling high above an island, finding all the crystals, or defeating enemies.
The last items are weapons like a sword or bomb that can be used offensively against enemies or even used to open up secret spaces like walls.
I can see my house from here!
Enemies are varied and have a cooldown on them. When you hit an enemy, a shield will come up around them to keep you from being able to just hit them repeatedly to death. Because of this, you have to adopt a back-and-forth playstyle of jumping in to hit the enemy and then jumping back to avoid their attacks.
I didn’t get as far as to unlock powers, but apparently, there’s an aspect of the game where you can be granted or stripped of powers later.
Overall, it’s a straightforward game with the option to be more challenging and I had a lot of fun with it. Since it’s free, there’s no reason not to give it a try!
And, as a bonus, this game didn’t make my old dinosaur of a computer lag. So, even older setups should be able to play without having to mess too much with graphics.
You can find Dream of the Star Haven on Steam. And, if you’re not sold on that, you can check out our review of Potions: A Curious Tale which we had a lot of fun with.
[…] Dream of Star Haven is a first-person exploration platformer that features light combat and death-defying jumps. […]