Mastodawn

Starvester: Fab Chillout Idle Game in the Cosmos ☄️

Starvester is a fabulous chillout incremental game by indie dev Syphono4. It’s set in space and a whole solar system of resource generation is at your clicking disposal.

As this is an idle game, it means the thing plays out over a stretch of time. It’s about patience, sitting, basking in the space type glory. It just launched this week and you can pick it up on Steam for a few quid.

Endless Harvesting in Starvester

As the fantastic idle game SPACEPLAN (2017) is one of our favourite indie games, we queued up immediately to get at Starvester. It’s a similar-ish space jaunt, just with a heavier focus on chillout resource generation.

SPACEPLAN is a more fast-paced, satirical take on a Stephen Hawking theory.

Here, the focus is on beholding the traversing orbital solar system you influence with your mining industries. It’s a clicker game, so you click on Earth to generate resources. From there, you develop out your industrial structures, flesh out the solar system by finding new planets, and watch as stuff zaps everywhere. Like this!

As you can see, then, it’s all rather relaxed. Idle games are about sitting patiently and watching the numbers go up, which when you reach certain set limits you can then expand out to new elements of the game.

The celestial playing field Starvest offers is all rather relaxed. The music in Starvester is beautiful and adds to that significantly, but we couldn’t find any information on the soundtrack online. Hopefully it’ll become available at some point and we’ll do a feature on that.

Music aside, we love the pixel art graphic style.

And once you get into the game further, you really do open up an incredible loop. The asteroid belt, for example, becomes a mining resource and it’s as if everything around you becomes interconnected.

Starvester is a shorter type of clicker game. Compared to something like the madness of Cookie Clicker (2013), players will get about 50 hours less gameplay time.

The dev is upfront about its concise nature, but we still got a solid 7 hour run out of our first playthrough. The game is so relaxing, and we find incremental games enthralling anyway, that it’s exactly what we wanted from the game.

That might be down to our autism, but idle games just do it for our ASD brains. The looping gameplay, the skyrocketing numbers, and chillout patience. It’s all very rewarding and immersive.

Thus, if you’re new to the genre then Starvester is a grand old place to start. Otherwise, it’s well worth a look anyway. The game is a joy.