Star of Providence Review (Hustle Cop)
For now, I feel like I've hit my ceiling with this game, despite wanting to see more of its content. It's a shame, but it is what it is, I guess. Figured I might as well write a review for closure.
Star of Providence is an excellent game crammed into a mediocre roguelike.
This game feels excellent to play. It's full of varied weapons, systems and mechanics that are just complex enough to surprise me, and challenges that (usually) feel worthwhile to conquer. When the game is at its best, I really feel like I'm fighting for my life against the odds. It also certainly doesn't hurt that the visual style, soundtrack, and touches of story/lore do a lot to keep me engaged and wanting to dive deeper.
However, I hit something of a wall. I reliably die on the final 2 stages of hard mode, and I've only even made it to the True Final Boss 2 or 3 times. On its own, dying over and over again while trying to improve doesn't bother me when the game is fun, but aspects of Star of Providence as a roguelike (or "roguelite", whatever) started to come undone for me throughout this process, leaving me in my present predicament, where I just can't justify spending more hours grinding this game with so many others to play.
Despite having plenty of content, this game is oddly stingy about how it doles it out. A lot of secret unlocks have extremely arcane prerequisites/conditions. Also, the items in the unlock shop in the base are extremely expensive, sometimes taking several hours worth of runs just to unlock a single weapon/perk/modifier that often feels underwhelming. There are also a number of random events that lead to interesting little narrative sequences with characters, but they are few and far between. The ultimate result of all this is that the overwhelming majority of my runs feel the exact same, fighting my way through dozens and dozens of familiar pre-made rooms, getting the same perks and items, getting whittled down by mistakes, dying somewhere in the final levels, and doing it all over and over again. The best roguelites (Nuclear Throne, Downwell, Hades, etc.) will usually implement features in a way that maintains enough variety to keep your experience feeling fresh, but Star of Providence does not do so, at least not very well.
I want to experience more of what this game has to offer. I want to free Null from his fate. I want to clear the secret areas and fight the secret bosses. But I can't, and it has gone from feeling like I'm conquering a difficult challenge to feeling like I'm just wasting time, so I have to stop, and that feels bad, because it really is a good game beneath those issues.