Starlight Re:Volver, to me, looks destined for greatness. It has a strong aesthetic hook that can woo in the otaku crowd. It had buzz back when it offered a free demo during Steam Next Fest. The online hub element to pair with its roguelike gameplay seems interesting.

I didn’t have time to check Starlight Re:Volver at launch, but two months later, all I see is a ghost town and a post by Pahdo Labs that it’s pivoting away from its original vision.

What happened?

Always-Online Indie Game In The Big 2025?

It turns out an hour of playing the Early Access of Starlight Re:Volver is enough to answer that question. Starlight Re:Volver just couldn’t justify itself to be an always-online MMO-ish roguelite that isn’t free-to-play.

First things first, yes, you have to buy Starlight Re:Volver, an always-online game that requires you to log into a dedicated server. In 2025. At the height of the Stop Killing Games movement where at least a million players in the EU have voiced their concerns about purchased games that may be shut down and rendered unplayable due to its online-only nature. Regardless of the outcome of the movement, there’s now an increased awareness, and hesitancy, in supporting paid online-only games. Yeah, bad timing.

Sure, the price is cheap (disclosure: we did received a review code for this) but you would’ve thought this was a free-to-play title with all the social aspects it has going for. A big lobby for players to hang out, play mini-games, chat in public. Think Destiny’s Tower, or Monster Hunter’s social hub. Starlight Re:Volver has that. When I logged in two weeks ago from the time of writing, there was barely anyone there in the Asia-Pacific server. A proper ghost town.

Middling Roguelite Gameplay

The other issue with Starlight Re:Volver is the gameplay itself, a top-down roguelike where you go from room to room, unlocking movesets and powering them up until you reach the final boss of that dungeon. Rooms are random, with the usual pick-three apply to the amount of choices you have at any time. The game launched around the same time as Hades II, the sequel to the one of the most successful and celebrated roguelike game, left Early Access. Yeah, talk about double-whammy.

And it’s an even harder blow when the action roguelike gameplay is underwhelming. I personally don’t play roguelikes as much—the last I did was Rogue Legacy 2 though I did dabble with Balatro and Vampire Survivors outside of my work hours.

So when I, a certified roguelike agnostic, somehow stumble into clearing my first run without me realising what I’m doing half of the time, that’s a cause of concern. Why am I not taking damage against this supremely tanky boss? And why is the boss supremely tanky that I feel like I spent half of the 45-minute run just whittling this damage sponge to its inevitable but slow doom? Is my build good? How did I manage to luck my way here?

I only did one full run, and now I’m full. I don’t feel like I need to do another. The hook isn’t hooking.

And it’s not just because I cleared the first dungeon in one go. Rather, my concern is the core gameplay. It can feel a little laggy at times. The gamepad controls are a little finicky in particular how iffy it is to switch lock-on targets (why not follow the rotation of the right stick rather than having to hit left or right?) and the difficulty of each wave/room swings between utterly trivial to insanely frustrating based on what enemy you have to face. Yeah you can go back and do a few more runs so you can gain more materials to unlock cosmetics Monster Hunter style (“quasi-grind-craft” where “grind-craft” is more like Warframe‘s style of progression) but if the main gameplay doesn’t feel fun or have not much for me to figure then why bother?

Where It Shines The Brightest? The Art

It’s a real shame because Starlight Re:Volver’s style is off the charts. The homage to anime stylings, from the J-Pop songs to the magical girl/tokusatsu henshin transformations the playable characters have are impressively done. Though it does crib too much into the style of worldbuilding where it likes to throw so much jargon in your face just for the sake of worldbuilding despite the story and world being very straightforward.

The way the UI is stylised, the characters move, heck even the saturated colour palette of the world are works of art. It’s a real shame that Starlight Re:Volver is all style with not much substance.

Closing Thoughts

The sort-of good news is that Pahdo Labs acknowledged the shortcomings and will be pivoting Starlight Re:Volver into Starlight Revolver: Ignite, a co-op roguelite without the online-only requirements. Since it’s a paid title, it should’ve gone that route in the first place, but hindsight is 20-20 after all. Even with the relative success of a big Steam Next Fest hit doesn’t mean it can bring in players to a paid online-only game, and Starlight Re:Volver learned that the hard way.

Starlight Re:Volver in its current iteration is definitely not it, and I do hope that the devs still have the fuel in the tank to actually turn this game around. There’s a real risk for this stylistically pleasing aesthetic to end up being lost media. But it needs to do more than just strip the online-only hub if it ever wishes to shine bright in the sea of roguelikes and roguelites out there.

*Played on PC. Review copy provided by the developer. *