For a while there was a glut of games similar to Vampire Survivors, thanks to it being successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams and having the entire genre practically to itself. A few great games managed to poke out of the crush, like Soulstone Survivors and Deep Rock Galatctic: Survivor, while other games borrowed bits and pieces of the Survivors formula to create something new, such as Whisker Squadron: Survivor. A lot of games got lost in the crowd, though, despite the overall quality being surprisingly high for the number of games released. Starnaut was an oddball even with as strange as some of the games got, though, being set in the same universe as El Shaddai despite looking and playing nothing like it.
Enemies In Every Shape And Size, Not Quite Literally But Very Close
Initially released in Early Access, Starnaut went through a number of updates with its biggest one being today’s 1.0 release, which about triples the content while making some major changes to the presentation. The first major change is in the name, which is now Mythical Concept STARNAUT rather than plain-vanilla Starnaut, and things just escalate from there. The camera has been pulled back to show much more of the action, eighteen stages have grown to a hair over sixty, weapon count almost doubled from 25 to 49, tons of different helmets each with their own stat changes and gameplay tweaks have been added, and the different enemy types have ballooned into the mid-hundreds. Granted, most of the enemies of are of the “drift towards the player” type, but having different ones ranging from rocking horses, floating bottles, birds, robots, and just about anything else allows each level to be dressed up with its own style.
Auto-Shooting Through the Strange Survivors Worlds of Starnaut
There’s no question that Starnaut is a strange one, quite possibly the most bizarre Survivors-type auto-shooter to show up yet.
The setup for Starnaut is that the world is destroyed but humanity put its dreams into hundreds of rockets, sending them throughout the dimensions. Copiasu was created by two surviving AIs to retrieve the rockets in order to see Earth reborn, and each stage of Starnaut has ten rockets to launch in order to complete it. Launching a rocket changes the structure of enemy waves and also refills a bit of Copiasu’s oxygen so he can fight longer. Starting off with a helmet and weapon of choice, Copiasu upgrades stats and buys weapons at a shop-bot who follows him around the stage, with the coins dropped by defeated enemies enabling the upgrades. Each rocket also requires coins to launch, though, so a big part of the strategy is knowing what to spend and when in order to survive the ever-growing horde.
Mythical Concept Starnaut is unquestionably a weird one, but it’s the kind of weird that would be a cult classic if it had come out in the PS2 days. Of course, the problem with cult classics is that nobody much cares at the time of release, and there’s no question Starnaut got buried in an overcrowded genre. It’s a surprisingly robust Survivors-like, though, putting its own stamp on the genre through dozens of levels where the action is frequently balanced by the constant choice is between powering up and progression, with the timer of the air gauge gently pushing you to make a decision rather than try to save up for both. Starnaut feels like a refugee from early-2000s gaming in a genre that didn’t exist until 2022, which is an excellent trick no matter what year it may be.
