Star's Favour" is an hourlong dungeon crawler, it has a few snippets of fun goofy dialogue, and while the battle system is elegant, it is very, very easy.

The story is simple. You are summoned to clear a star temple of sorts, and on you go to do that. The end.
There are a few goofy twists to how this is set up, how the hero party deals with the quest and the people involved, but there is little dialogue overall. There are a couple of lines at the very beginning, as well as an NPC to question, and again at the very end, with learning skills being the only conversation-starter inbetween.


The story summed up. Thanks!

There are a few cats giving you hints and tutorial-basics, as well as recommendations. One cat tells you that one of two bosses to procceed is easier than the other - this is handy and dandy .. it sadly is untrue. You have only one magic user at that point, and while the cat wants to sell you you need magic, you are perfectly fine going the physical route. In fact, the fight is much easier and, well, more fun due to it being less than 1/3 of the fighting length of the other boss. The other boss is a little weaker, but just takes ages to kill.

The graphics and sounds are from a package and very well-used and pretty. There are additional character portraits for our lovely fighters. No fullscreen is possible, sadly.

The Battles

At the heart of each dungeon crawler is its battle system. As I mentioned, the battle system feels very elegant in its design idea - there are a lot of discussion on how to best achieve this, and a few of the well-known names here strive to abandon potion hoarding- and leveling-systems in favor of spell-based use-all-every-battle-systems.
Now, I will not discuss whether or not this is better, but discarding the need to conserve items and mana is a factor that plays a role in and outside of battle, and is simply an additional factor to have fun or frustration, depending on the implementation. Lacking this, the battles themselves need to be top-notch, because there is no added layer of planning outside of them.

The system is thus - you have a range of items to use in-fight, which refill themselves completely after battle.. You can find additional items which also refill themselves, as well as equipment. You heal completely after each battle.
You can reach lvl 5 at maximum, improving stats. Spells are earned by defeating special monsters. Combat is with on-touch encounters, none are hostile or follow you. However, to reach treasure chests and proceed from stairways, you will need to defeat a couple of monster groups.

You have no auto-attack, but start out with two spells which always need mana. You can rest instead of acting during a turn, recovering a little HP and 10 mp.
You can always run away and regroup, and dying is no issue, either, as you are "protected in the holy plane".


Should I try dying to test?

The item-system reminded me faintly of Rootbound, where you had a few items you could refill to their maximum at the inn. But in comparison to Rootbound, you do so after every single fight, and you have no means of expanding the items while compensating this addition for equipment you could buy instead.
Now what this means is this : there is no sense of danger or scarcity in any possible way. You can run away and heal if you mess up, you have a plethora of items I not once needed to all use, you could recover mp/hp even without using any items but will never ever need to use the rest command until the last boss - and then this is helped by the fact many attacks are rendered useless giving you "free turns" to use. (if you play stupid, that is).
It also means that fighting monsters itself gives you no noticeable advantage and the only reason to ever fight weak enemies is to get to chests. And it is a drag to do so. I fought the endboss lvl 3/5 and that really only because I wanted to grab all treasure chests. Experience is worthless.

Okay - there is the resting command, but due to the abundancy of mana and mana-recovery items you really will not need to use it, at all. Your mana pool is very high, with 90 when normal attack and heal spells use 5 mana. That's 18 turns with no items used. You start with 3 30-mana for all party members items. That's 36 turns of just attacking / healing for everyone. And afterwards it's all restored.
There are ailment cure / buff spells requiring 10 mana, but again, this gives still (felt) complete freedom in using them.

The simplicity in spells is great in theory, however, you will use only 2 for the most part and then gain most others one after another. You need to battle a golden monster group before obtaining the next spell, and while there are 5 spells to have by the end, I found them all in short succession, the last two having only the guarding monsters to kill before facing the end-boss.

With one being offensive, and the other supportive, you spam your attack spells and cure/heal when necessary, or keep parry (dodging + aggroing enemies) up//cast it every three turns. Attack, heal, repeat. DONE. Use item once out of mana.
This is what happens in most dungeoncrawlers, but due to mana conservation. Except mana conservation planning is cut out, and thus it ends up being very .. very dull and inconsequential. Why are you fighting enemies? You gain no money, experience is worthless, the battles are boring, and you end up the same afterwards anyway. You do this for about 80% of the game, too.
There ARE ailments, however, you use bleed and curse which are added to the normal attacks anyway, countering blessings when possible. The enemies may use curse, bleed and paralysis. But you have just the cures for them at hand. There is no planning to be done around these, you just do your thing and cure what comes up.

Now the introduction of new spells is fun, but most of them will not be used due to the high mana-cost/low reward, its limited use - lots of group spells when you are off to face only bosses at that point (the chain lightning was fun) - and are overshadowed by the overpoweredeness that is our duelist Karnak.
Her usual double-attack already is strong (the strongest fighter of the 4), but where she dealt around 150~ dmg, her backstab dealt 600-700. It needs curse to get this dmg bonus, but spells so have it that when you first get it one character's normal attack has the chance to add curse - and noone's immune to it. You then get a second character to add curse to their attack. And on you go to build your attack pattern on getting curse onto the enemy to then slaughter it instead of dragging the fight endlessly long without it ever being difficult.


See this spell? This is death.

There is limited range to use support spells, and due to its combination of healing ailment and added support (atk +, or dodge up) value you only use it then. Fighting is almost always the better option. You get curse onto the enemy, Karnak kills 'em, the remaining character uses items and also has the heal spell. Or if one of the two already applied curse, they may use items as well. DONE. There is a support circle our ranger learns making you immune to any ailments ... only you will never encounter them again! The group spells, too, were very unreliable for boss-fights, making you use the usual range.

Magic used by enemies overall seemed far too weak many a times. The earth-spell was strong, but the fire ones were really really weak. The dragon breath that used two turns to build up did .. nothing. A little bit of area dmg, 30-40 on 200+ HP characters. The golden flame group revolved around respawning smaller flames .. except that they dealt around 8 dmg with their attacks on 200+ HP characters and could simply be ignored. I killed one to make the big one revive them sometimes, and just went for the big one.

The end-boss is probably the core of how these battles felt to me. Dragged on for no good reason.
Now the setup is very interesting - you have a group of three with one being a healer (completely to be ignored due to the massive dmg output of Karnak), one being a mage summoning some things later, and one being a sleeping "berserker"-looking thing called Asura (you can expect this one to hit hard). So now you have a choice of safely taking out the two ads first or using area spells to do it possibly quicker, but waking Asura.
I decided to play it safe and take them out quickly and easily, and on to Asura it went. Now here I did a big mistake prolonging the fight needlessly, as I failed to see I already applied curse and thought she was immune, thus avoiding the super-strong attack. I noticed later and then ended the fight swiftly.

That aside, Asura's dmg is very .. very .. very weak due to her constantly changing her state instead of attacking. This gives you a lot of free turns, and her immunity to either spells, or physical attacks, or both (retaliation, careful. Well, you have enough room to heal it) - the message is hard to read when it pops up, but you can either use the battle log which takes a lil while to get to menu-wise, or you can use the symbols displayed.
Now it seems like this was a bug, but spells were continously repelled even after the magic mirror faded. So after a certain point I could only use physical attacks (thankfully, they are the more reliable kind anyhow). Asura was weak, but had defensive measures. Even prolonging the fight needlessly, you had plenty free turns and items to use.

Now all that said - there was no joy for me in the battles themselves, and sadly no fun to have inbetween. The little snippets of dialogue were fun, but a rarity.
It looks good, the maps are nice, you have a little bit hoarding items and skills, but it all feels very very shallow and devoid of tactical prowess or any sense of progression.
Some people may like this style, I found myself bored.