Starless Abyss: The roguelite spaceship deckbuilder I've wanted for years

If you're a fan of deckbuilders and space battlers, this one's a must-try!

Quick Facts
Publisher: No More Robots
Platform(s): Steam
Controller support (A-F): B+. A little analog stick-as-mouse cursor movement needed. But overall, good snapping to selections via the d-pad in menus, and during battle.
Cost (at time of review): $14

It feels like a decade since I first fell in love with the roguelite genre via the gateway drug that was FTL. I I think it's actually been longer. But it does seem like I've been waiting an eternity for a new roguelite which, even if not a full successor to FTL, at least brought me that same initial spark of excitement to play, and re-play.

One recent example which caught some attention was Void War - which, while I did like what I saw, I felt was just a little too close to FTL. Another is the very cute and funny Cobalt Core. A great deckbuilder and spaceship battler in its own right, I still highly recommend and love that game, but honestly I haven't gotten back into it after beating it a couple times.

Instead I have found a great spaceship deckbuilder with a little dice action for good measure that I'd like to tell you about, namely Starless Abyss. 

Premise, Basics, and Gameplay

The premise is simple: You are one of several selectable proximae (some kind of consciousness, human or otherwise), defending the universe against demons from another dimension which have appeared to try and ruin your fancy lunch picnic. Or just consume all our souls, whichever.

Combat is turn-based, and like many deckbuilders, your ship(s) have a limited amount of energy which you can spend on cards with different costs. You draw a certain number of cards from your draw pile, each with its own energy cost (green circled number). Some cards exhaust for that battle once they are played, most go to the discard pile, shuffle, repeat. You know the drill.

In combat, you move your ship(s) around the hexagonal grid and fight against the various demonic space-horrors. Your various attack cards cause different type of damage, debuffs, and have different range limits, often forcing you to reposition your ship at the start of your turn to be in range to attack the enemy. And of course you have your defensive cards to bump up your shields, or utility cards, which let you do things like teleport to another part of the battlefield.

When your turn ends, the enemies get their turn, and there are often a lot of enemies not visible at the start of the game who will spawn in to complicate things further. Defeat them all, or just the boss at the end of the level, to move on.

I say ship(s) above, because your default proxima pilot actually commands 3 ships and individually they feel a little underwhelming, though some cards cause some nice multi-ship bonus effects. This is still really not my sort of thing though, and I much prefer one ship to manage. But take heart, there is a cool brain-in-jar proxima you get access to very early on, who has a nice beefy spaceship to compensate(?) for being 'only' one combat vehicle.

One other thing I should mention early on is the Heat mechanic, whereby playing attack cards will cause your ship to heat up by a certain amount (red triangle icon on the card). When your ship overheats, it cannot attack further until you either use a card which removes heat, or at the end of your turn, your ship will automatically drop its heat level by a set amount. I honestly don't love this mechanic. The default 3 ship arrangement runs into this a lot, where each ship basically only attacks once or twice before overheating, forcing you to pick a different ship to attack from. Again, not my favorite idea, and it honestly feels a bit superfluous, but there's a lot more to like here.

The graphics are a wonderful mix of pixely retro-style, and the enermies appear not as other ships a la FTL, but as Lovecraftian pixel art monsters. The low-res pixel style is very pleasing to me as someone who grew up with the NES, but it may not be for everyone. There are also a lot of low-res-and-frame-count loop animations that function as as transitions between encounters, which helps set a surreal sci-fi atomosphere. There is a part of me that wishes the adversaries were just ships, and not distrubing creatures that explode into viscera, but we can't always have everything.

In classic deckbuilder style, in battle you have your turn, spend energy to play the cards; some cards do damage, some build up your ships' shields, and some have utility like putting down offensive or defensive mines, or let your ship teleport around the grid. 

Great Quality of Life Improvements

What sets this game apart is the amount of nice quality of life improvements it brings to the table, especially around RNG. One of my favorite things is the D.I.C.E. system.

Over the course of the game you pick up dice of random values (1-6 naturally). You use these to affect the outcome of the random (non-battle) encounters you'd experience in roguelikes. But rather than just being locked into a set of choices based on your perks, with either set outcomes or an arbitrary percent changes of success, you can instead spend one of your D.I.C.E. (as long as it's over the requirement minimum) to push the chance your action suceeds from 25% to 100%. I really like this mechanism. You wont always have the dice to succeed at every encounter, but it's enough to get the outcomes you really want.

You might read these descriptions, and think 'jeez, multiple ships to manage each turn, deck building, heat mechanic, dice mechanic, this is too much!'. It could come off that way at first, but trust me as you play the game it does not feel overwhelming. And the game does a good job of displaying the relevant info about your ships, even with a dozen enemies on the screen at the same time.

Other QoL improvements that I love: the Store has pretty much everything you'd need; I would honestly say it is even better than in something like Slay The Spire. You've got a subscreen to buy new cards, and another to either upgrade or remove a card. You can even do an upgrade/remove more than once per visit, if you have enough credits to do so (first time is costs 75 credits, the second 100, etc...). You can also buy an assortment of ship perks (artifacts), and you can even pick up a totally new ship if you don't like your current one, or if it's suffered a lot of damage in battle. This is a pricey thing to do, but it can definitely be worth it. Overall it's a joy to visit the store.

I never said it was perfect...

This game is not without its issues though. I will say I've not experienced anything game-breaking so far. But I have seen the occasional issue, and there's some things I think could be improved.

I have experienced one issue where after selecting the next destination, the game simply went into an animation that just looped endlessly, causing a soft lock. But happily I was able to save and restart right from there again.

I've also had more than a few runs where I hit 2 stores in a row. This is normal with random path generation, but it feels a little more frequent than I would have expected, with the number of hours I've clocked in so far.

Finally, one suggested improvement: It would be so nice to be able to switch tabs/screens in the Store using the LB+RB buttons. This is a pretty standard practice, and as far as I know those buttons have no other function in the store.

Final word

Overall I really adore this game. Even though I generally prefer to only have to manage one ship, there is a lot of additional flexibility offered by the other proxima, and I haven't even unlocked all the characters. 

Honestly this is a game that is more than the sum of its parts, but the sum is also impressive, especially for under $20. If you like spaceship deckbuilders, especially one of the games I mentioned in the intro, I think you might really enjoy Starless Abyss.