Hello, players!
RPG Maker 2000 is surely an old engine, but there are still some cool games that are made, and one is... The Stairway! This is a 2015 game by quiesphere AKA Yomi (from Spain, and it's important to mention that because the game is in english and... it's well written!). I've already reviewed another game from this developer, Omen of Rain, but it was pretty short so I wasn't convinced to give a rating. This time things are different because The Starway took me about 50 minutes to complete, so it's surely a longer and more complex game.

In this game we play as Stella, that's looking for someone. She's inside a mansion (in the beginning I believed it was a doctor's waiting room since she said she felt unconfortable there, but... nope! Lol!) and she won't leave until she finds her friend, so she starts exploring the place taking a starway that will take her to strange places! It's like a sort of Alice in Wonderland that instead or going underground through a tunnel she goes upward climbing a stair that leads through gardens, acquariums and even a village. But progressing is not simple!


Oh yes, Roseanne! Our specialty is finding items for people...

The game is not a game without challenges, and in this game, but they're pretty easy and I did not need the walkthrough. In fact if you're lost just try to interact with everything you see, and do not worry of making a wrong choice, since you can immediately retry with no risk of game over. Anyway this also makes sense once you reach the end of the game that I'm sure you will reach in about one hour (you can still save anytime and anywhere if you wish so relax and take your time if you want). Anyway I liked some of these tasks, in particular a sort of "treasure hunt" set inside a single room where you find riddles about what you should examine to get the next hint and so on until you find what you need. Nice!

And nice are also the graphics: I'm pretty sure it's all custom made, since the developer made some custom assets also for the previous game (the ending slide for example shows the same style) and it's really charming: the game has lots of tiny details (again, like the previous game) that sometimes change as you progress and nicely made facesets, even if only Stella has different expressions... the other faces are blank. Mapping is also well made, I only find the walking speed a bit slow, but you do not have to walk a lot around except maybe in one of the last maps that's pretty big.
Sounds seems to be RTPs for the most part, I'm not sure about the piano music you will hear during the game, anyway it's good.


Thanks a lot! So long and have a nice day! Let's read the...

Final Verdict
The Stairway is a charming little game, I'd define it as a relaxing surreal adventure (well it includes talking animals and faceless humans), not a horror, not a game with time limits or battles or action sections but just a lighthearted story that you can enjoy. For a first game it's quite good, simple and linear with a single ending but good. The graphics are once again unique and done with lot of attention to the details, so try it, why not?