Roguelikes are one of those genres that I just can’t seem to get enough of, especially those with deckbuilder elements. After an absolute tear of fun roguelikes in 2024, with my personal favorite being Chrono Ark, 2025 looks like it’s going to potentially be starting off with my newest roguelike obsession: a title called Starless Abyss.
Plot Ahoy!
In Starless Abyss, you’re tasked with jumping across realities to fight eldritch Outer Gods in order to prevent them from terrorizing every universe. A brilliant mesh of sci-fi, horror, and roguelike deckbuilding elements, Starless Abyss instantly thrusts the player into a universe-spanning military operation to kill gods that have invaded across all timelines and realities. JRPGs typically end with a bunch of teenagers banding together to kill a god, but in a turn-based strategy roguelike like Starless Abyss, you start the game as a soldier that’s timeline hopping, trying to find a single reality where there’s potential for victory against the Lovecraftian threat.
Review Notes
When you first boot up the beta for Starless Abyss, you’re treated to a quick character selection, of which only one character is available at the beginning- though you can see others you can potentially unlock later. Your progress through Starless Abyss is denoted by a kind of choose your own adventure path. You’re given two choices of what you’d like to see next, whether it’s combat stage, repair shop, card store, etc. Each path may have different rewards, with some giving you powerful artifacts, some yielding new cards, or others giving you access to extremely powerful rituals that you can use to turn the tides of battle.
A combat stage starts when you encounter an eldritch creature in space, and you’ll draw a number of cards that represent your weapons and defensive systems. Each card has their own energy costs, and some create heat you’ll need to account for. And once you run out of energy, you’ll have to end your turn.
The attacking cards differ in attack ranges, whether or not they need line of sight, which is important as destroyed creatures leave behind remains, and special effects they can have like leaving radioactive clouds. You can move your ships once per turn, and their positions are locked after they attack, so you’ll be needing to balance when to get in range to use your weapon cards, and when to retreat to avoid enemy attacks.
Clearing a stage will reward you with credits, artifacts, and a choice of new cards you can add to your deck. There are especially powerful eldritch rituals that, in exchange for sacrificing a couple cards in hand for the rest of the battle, will do widespread effects like damaging every enemy in the battle or doubling your energy pool. The downside to the rituals is that it doesn’t remove the useless cards from your deck, so you can still draw them, which means the timing of the rituals is pretty important as if you use them too early you might draw useless cards multiple times during drawn-out encounters.
Starless Abyss runs on a very simple player phase and enemy phase system, so you’ll move your ships and spend energy to use your cards and then end your turn which will allow your enemies to move and attack. It’s very similar to Advance Wars, the Fire Emblem series, and many, many other games in this regard. The controls work for both keyboard and mouse control schemes and gamepads, though you’ll have moments where you need to control a cursor with an analog stick if you play using a controller. The visuals themselves are wonderfully detailed pixel art drawn in a realistic style, and the human characters really stand out from the eldritch abominations you encounter in the galactic frontier.
If there’s one complaint I have about Starless Abyss, it’s that the user interface is tiny, especially on a Steam Deck. I wasn’t actually able to get this title to run on my PC at all as it suffered a Unity crash on startup, but the user interface and text boxes have text so tiny that I struggled to actually read the text on multiple occasions without using the Deck’s magnifier shortcut.
It also doesn’t help that some text boxes were coded improperly too, overlapping multiple lines of text on top of one another, making them completely illegible. It’s unclear if this is a Steam Deck specific resolution issue, or if the text boxes just do that sometimes, but I figured this worth mentioning since handheld gaming PCs are becoming more popular.
TLDR
All in all, Starless Abyss is a lot of fun. The visuals are amazing and work with the theme super well, and fine-tuning your deck of cards to be as powerful as it can be while controlling a fleet of spaceships to go fight eldritch gods in space is one of the best premises possible. Starless Abyss even fixed one of the weirdest narrative problems in roguelikes, you know the one: where you die but get to restart all over again.
Should you happen to die in Starless Abyss, you just fail that timeline and then move onto the next one. That is a great concept, and an amazing time was had in this beta.
I’ll definitely be looking forward to the full release of Starless Abyss when it releases (hopefully) sometime very soon on the Steam platform.