I initially believed this game to be some sort of walking-sim taking place in a rendition of purgatory or a coma-triggered dream state which seemed cool enough for a quick playthrough..
the audio and visual pair well to create a great and haunting atmosphere for this relatively entertaining albeit short game (avg playing time 1-2 hrs for the slowest playthrough). although the graphics are beautifull rendered by Unity, the npc animations tend to slide rather than walk. however, this does not take away too much from the game as one is usually running from these creatures and during those chase sequences the tension is manifested beautifully. This game’s atmosphere is primarily focused upon its magnificent lighting and ambient sound design. The strobe, absolute brightness and darkness utilized through the majority of Starbo are both awesome and nerve-wracking..awesome in that they are used to their fullest advantage and add to the anxiety invoked by the game…nerve-wracking in that sometimes one may think the game is loading only to realize that they are in a dark corner staring at the ceiling and other times it simply can give one a headache (if not a full on seizure: this game is NOT for epileptics).
The voice-acting of the protagonist is well done but not necessarily crucial to the game. Furthermore, the whole searching for keys (especially with regards to what the setting of the game ends up being) in order to unlock random doors seems to have been added simply to give the player something else to interact (as there is little for the player to interact with oveall) with and are entirely unneccesary. The auto-save points seem arbitary and are way too spread apart – making a full playthrough in one or two settings highly recommended if not forced.
I must admit, though the game is short, its long seemingly cloned corridors can be a bit tedious/boring to tread through when all one wants to do is see the next surreal and beautiful vista. The developers could have added a bit more variation to the aforementioned corridors as the player will be spending about 70-80% of the game traversing them. That being said, when the game does utilize those corridors in combination with an enemy and soul-piercing audio, it truly is scary…but is it a horror game? I would say no. Starbo is a surreal thriller adventure with elements of horror. Perhaps my favourite mechanic of the game is that in certain points of the game time speeds up or slows down, truly adding to both the terror and the dream-like quality of the game.
Overall, Starbo is a fun playthrough…however, it has absolutely no replayability factor and is much too short to merit any price tag greater than $5. It was scary and tense when it wanted to be but when i got to the abrupt ending i was rather dissapointed. Much of the gameplay shown in the trailer is simply not present. The coolest scenes of the game are fleeting at best. The little exposition there is seems lackluster. What you get is pretty good but upon finishing the game one feels like they just played the first chapter of a much greater work..unfortunately, that is not the case. If this game had more meat on its bones i’d be happy to give it a 7 or 8…however, due to its length and wasted potential i’ll grant it a 6.

please excuse the hurried nature of this review, i was literally writing it during my first playthrough of the game…alt-tabbing every fifteen minutes to add to and take away from my wordiest IGDB review thus far.