Guitar Hero meets Earthbound in 2024’s strangest game

For a good chunk of my young-adult life, I was obsessed with the idea of creating my masterpiece. It’s not even that I wanted to create a great work of art with something to say; I felt I had to. My fear of death led me to believe that I needed to find a way to leave a lasting legacy behind, like the filmmakers and playwrights I revered at the time. While that feeling dissipated in later years, it reformed as a constant imposter syndrome that I still grapple with from time to time. There are moments where I feel that my writing or music isn’t good enough. At other times, I become bitter when a work I’m proud of doesn’t get the attention I wished it deserved. It’s a vicious ouroboros that I struggle to break out of.

This may sound like a strangely dramatic way to introduce Starstruck: Hands of Time. If you look at the new PC game’s Steam page, you’ll find what looks like a goofy adventure that takes notes from Earthbound, Guitar Hero, and Katamari Damacy. While that’s all true, the avant-garde adventure is hiding something much more grotesque below its bubbly surface. It’s a slow-bubbling anxiety attack, one that makes for one of 2024’s most unexpectedly vital games.

Spiraling out of orbit

Starstruck: Hands of Time begins in a playful fashion. An astronaut travels back to the past after the Earth of the future is overtaken by a mysterious mold. With the help of their cheerful robo companion, they head back to the past to find the source of this sludge. That takes them to an unassumingly small town inhabited by a happy-go-lucky kid named Edwin. It’s a normal, and very misleading, start to a wild four-hour odyssey that doesn’t go anywhere you’re expecting.