Starfinder: Afterlight, a CRPG based on one of my favourite systems that pulled in almost $1 million on Kickstarter, is starting to look ship-shape

I’ve been keeping a close eye on Starfinder: Afterlight for a few reasons—firstly, I’m a Pathfinder 2e sicko, and Starfinder 2e works on a ton of the same rules. Secondly, because I love a good CRPG, and thirdly, because this game has a surprising amount of financial and voice acting heft behind it.

After getting a surprising €828,164 (around $960,000) funded out of a humble €75,000 ask on Kickstarter, the game managed to snag Red Dead Redemption’s Arthur Morgan for its narration. It also just so happens to be getting voice direction from Neil Newbon, who you might know as Astarion from Baldur’s Gate 3—and the man’s voicing an interstellar priest bug, which is as charming as it sounds.

Alongside some promising key art, I was curious to see if Epicteller Game’s debut game could put another solid CRPG on the market—and after going through the playtest, I was rendered… cautiously optimistic. What I played was very rough around the edges, missing features, customisation, and so on.

I shan’t say its official demo, which is now out on Steam, has quelled my apprehension completely. It has, however, left me feeling like Epictellers can pull this thing together with enough polish, given the marked improvement from the playtest I enjoyed in March.

First up, the bad: It still runs terribly, and doesn’t have any graphical settings at all yet, animations for combat are a touch clunky, and you can’t make a custom character—which is a huge draw of any CRPG, though you can pick from three custom premades.

It’s also a fairly linear demo, and while I’d be a fool to expect the breadth of something like Baldur’s Gate 3, it’d still be nice to have a little more space to roam, meaningful NPCs to talk to, and a side quest or two. As it stands, the demo’s just a series of hallways connected by story, with a few choices to make.

But in comparison to what I played in March? It’s clear that the polishing is being done. The demo opens with a gorgeously-animated intro that sets the space-swashbuckling tone well, as your ship is assailed by the dreaded Corpse Fleet. Your captain, Khali, heroically tackles their leader off a ledge and leaves you to defend a set of escape pods carrying your crewmates.

You crash-land on the backwater of Akiton, and mysteriously, five years have passed—not a terrible setup for an RPG by any means, and much improved by the fact you immediately meet Newbon’s effusive and peppy bug priest with a baby strapped to his chest. Don’t worry, it’s traditional for Shirren, the little guy’s fine.

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And while this game chugs, performance issues can be fixed—the more important part is its aesthetic, which is impressive for a studio of this size. Character portraits are lovingly rendered, the comic-book style cutscenes are cute, and Akiton is bright and colourful, plus will look measurably more so when Epictellers figures out how to get it running at a reasonable framerate.

The voice-acting, for a smaller-scale project, is also charming, if a touch inconsistent, but there’s a great marriage of voice talent and spectacular character design for your companions, so the focus is in the right place.

The UI is much-improved, carving up character features and abilities into neat little icons, while also tucking plenty of info for min-maxers like me into nested tooltips. And while the combat in the demo is tethered to low-level play, which isn’t exciting in any TTRPG system, I can vouch that it will get more interesting as time goes on. As a Pathfinder 2e freak, the three action system has made an evangelist out of me.

It’ll need a better tutorial to pull in the layman, mind. I was merrily applying +1 status bonuses and avoiding the dreaded multiple attack penalty because I’m already deeply familiar with the system. As it stands, though, the game awkwardly hucks a bunch of missable tooltips at you in the right corner of the screen. I don’t usually advocate for pop-ups, but given how crunchy Starfinder 2e can be, it wouldn’t hurt to hold your hand. Or, at the very least, let you know that spamming attacks won’t help you.

It’s hard to properly tell the trajectory of any given, early project like this—game development is a monstrously complicated business and I’m working with two data points—but I wouldn’t bet against Epictellers being able to get this thing ship-shape in time.

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