Guitar Hero meets Earthbound in 2024’s strangest game

For a good chunk of my young-adult life, I was obsessed with the idea of creating my masterpiece. It’s not even that I wanted to create a great work of art with something to say; I felt I had to. My fear of death led me to believe that I needed to find a way to leave a lasting legacy behind, like the filmmakers and playwrights I revered at the time. While that feeling dissipated in later years, it reformed as a constant imposter syndrome that I still grapple with from time to time. There are moments where I feel that my writing or music isn’t good enough. At other times, I become bitter when a work I’m proud of doesn’t get the attention I wished it deserved. It’s a vicious ouroboros that I struggle to break out of.

This may sound like a strangely dramatic way to introduce Starstruck: Hands of Time. If you look at the new PC game’s Steam page, you’ll find what looks like a goofy adventure that takes notes from Earthbound, Guitar Hero, and Katamari Damacy. While that’s all true, the avant-garde adventure is hiding something much more grotesque below its bubbly surface. It’s a slow-bubbling anxiety attack, one that makes for one of 2024’s most unexpectedly vital games.

Spiraling out of orbit

Starstruck: Hands of Time begins in a playful fashion. An astronaut travels back to the past after the Earth of the future is overtaken by a mysterious mold. With the help of their cheerful robo companion, they head back to the past to find the source of this sludge. That takes them to an unassumingly small town inhabited by a happy-go-lucky kid named Edwin. It’s a normal, and very misleading, start to a wild four-hour odyssey that doesn’t go anywhere you’re expecting.

In those early moments, Starstruck sets the stage for a charming suburban adventure about Edwin, a young guitarist, trying to rise to stardom within his town. His first mission is to head to a local venue and play a gig with his pals. It’s a sweet start that immediately calls Earthbound to mind, a game that’s become an important touchstone for indie developers in recent years. It makes sense; Nintendo’s classic RPG is one of the few games that really feels like it understands young people and the personal struggles they face in everyday life. In its most direct reference, Starstruck’s characters are displayed as handmade clay models that call back to the physical figures used in Earthbound’s original marketing materials.

The more Starstruck sets up its story, the more light-hearted it becomes. When I get to the venue for my show, I’m introduced to an entire Guitar Hero-type rhythm game where I play along to songs (Starstruck is even compatible with some guitar controllers). It’s a messy minigame due to some hard-to-parse guitar riffs and sloppy controller integration, but it’s another callback that puts me into a time and place. I’m once again in the mindset of a young adult wondering when my life is going to begin in between Freebird solos.

Even then, Starstruck still hasn’t played all its gameplay cards. When Edwin has trouble getting into the venue, the astronaut observing them steps in to help by sending their hand down to Earth. In a minigame reminiscent of Katamari Damacy, I need to smash as much stuff as I can around town until I can summon a hammer to knock an opening into the fence surrounding the venue. It’s a bizarre visual, but another filled with a familiar youthful energy.

Things get much weirder from there.

Only near its halfway mark, after going through those minigames a few times and meeting a few friends, does Starstruck show its hands. Edwin and his friends begin to let their different anxieties slip. It turns out that the gang is suffering from different identity issues. One charter struggles with imposter syndrome over her music; another is desperate to be the center of attention and have his work celebrated. The more those feelings come out, the more the game itself corrupts.

There’s no way to easily describe what unfolds in Starstruck’s back half; you’ll really have to see it for yourself to fully soak in its overwhelming panic attack. A cute adventure veers into eldritch horror territory as each character succumbs to their anxieties. The cheery visuals give way to avant-garde eeriness, in a turn that calls Neon Genesis Evangelion’s striking midseason direction shift to mind. The deeper these characters get into their minds, wishing they could be anywhere else than where they are in life, the farther they spin away from Earth. There’s nothing up there but darkness. It slowly swallows the entire adventure like a snake eating its own tail.

If this all sounds like a baffling mess, it is at times. Starstruck takes some wild swings that don’t always feel like they cleanly connect. Its personal story takes several detours to showcase the history of art theft, delve into the history of the Roman empire, revisit the moon landing, and more. Its gameplay can similarly feel unfocused as it hops between ideas at a rapid-fire pace. It’s confounding, but effective too. Starstruck feels like a mental breakdown in motion; it’s a throbbing brain that can’t keep its focus as it spirals deeper and deeper into philosophical despair.

Despite how out there it is, Starstruck tells a down-to-earth story that’s still sticking with me days after rolling credits. I can see myself in its insecure heroes, so desperate to be the center of the universe that they’re left alone in the cold vacuum of space. Maybe we take how miraculous it is to be a face in a crowd here on this planet for granted.

Starstruck: Hands of Time is available now on PC.