OPUS: Echo of Starsong

Platform: Switch (also on Windows and iOS)
Release: 2022 (enhanced), 2021 (original)

OPUS: Echo of Starsong is the first I played in the OPUS series, but serves as a stand alone story in an anthology that seems primarily connected by mood and narrative genre (science fiction) and not necessary by the type of games they are. I was drawn to it mostly due to the trailer for the enhanced version, which promised a heart rending love story set in space with the newly added voice acting. And the music is lovely. I have the soundtrack playing as I write this.

Though it's more of a space exploration game from a mechanics perspective (think of games where you're constantly looking for new resources to sell so you can buy fuel and upgrades for your ship), it's heavily story based, with most of the narrative delivered through visual novel style dialogue boxes and artwork stills for cut scenes. Incidental events and encounters flesh out the worldbuilding.

The game interestingly enough doesn't have a title screen, with simply the option to start, bringing the player in for a landing as an elderly man exits his spacecraft on some strange world because of a task he will not entrust to anyone else. We learn that his name is Jun, and he is here because of Eda, who he has not seen in 66 years. At this point in his life he has retired from his duties as clan leader and it's clear that he is not without some regret.

With elderly Jun serving as our narrator and the frame story, we go back to when he first arrives in the star system of Thousand Peaks.

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It's a foregone conclusion that Jun and Eda did not part voluntarily, setting our story up for a tragic ending, and there is no surprise twist in this regard. For some players this might be a problem, but though there is a heartfelt conclusion to the frame story, Echo of Starsong is mostly about the journey. We do not know precisely what awaits Old Jun at the end of his road, but as he looks back on his adventures with older, wiser eyes, we can see what brought him here.

Since Old Jun is our narrator, every location in the game, every object you find, comes with commentary from his older self. Even if you somehow manage to play through the game in a single sitting (possible, but not advisable) you would not be able to escape that this is a story being told by an older man looking back on younger days, and not without a bit of nostalgia. Though he and Eda meet under messy and unfortunate circumstances, they begin to bond and there is joy between them. Together they and Eda's adopted sister Remi are the three member crew of the Red Chamber, a ship designed to assist witches in detecting asteroids containing lumen, the energy source that powers starships.

They do odd jobs, explore asteroids to claim mining rights, and even discover an alien space station. The three are young, occasionally make brash or even hypocritical decisions, and don't always get along, but all three are social outcasts in Thousand Peaks for one reason or another. Jun is a self-exiled noble from East Ocean, a star system which native Peakers resent for having abandoned them during the twenty year long Lumen War after promising they wouldn't. Eda is a witch, which are hated by most of the populace for siding with the United Mining Corporation which ultimately won the war, and also by United Mining which scapegoated the witches after their usefulness was done (Eda did not serve, having not finished her training). And Remi is a war orphan unable to fit back into normal society after having lived spent a part of her childhood as a victim of human trafficking.

Though these three are not the first cast of characters to end up self-sabotaging and making a mountain of mistakes, they do so in a realistic way. Remi, for her part, hates Jun. Like really hates Jun. At one point I was not sure whether Remi just fantasized about killing him or would have seriously attempted it. Eventually I concluded it was just hate, and would not have progressed to actual murder, but her dislike is severe enough that at point one it's easy enough to suspect her of having left Jun for dead that even Eda calls her out on it.

But when we get to know Remi better, we realize that the reason she hates Jun isn't just because he's a new person in Eda's life, but because she's afraid that Eda will leave with him, meaning that Remi would be alone again. Eda is the only family she has and Remi doesn't like how Eda's actions are making her hate herself for feeling jealous. She knows what she wants isn't fair, but she's so afraid of being left behind that she can't see that Eda and Jun would never leave her to begin with. (And in fact, once we get to the end, we find out that Remi eventually comes to live with Jun in East Ocean and must have become loved enough by his clan that one attendant calls her Grandma Remi.)

OPUS: Echo of Starsong is a short game, coming in at 12-15 hours for most people, so it makes the most of the time it has. There are no obvious sidequests, though there are a few optional areas to explore and one visually sweet extra that can be unlocked with some backtracking near the end of the game. Likewise unless a location is critical to the story, exploration is handled by text rather than direct player control of Jun.

But at the same time, the text is what brings a lot of the game to life. Thousand Peaks has its own mythology based on the aliens who once inhabited the star system, and they have been adopted by the humans who live there as gods. Though the aliens do not directly impact the story in any way, excavation of their artifacts and the lumen systems they set up in the star system's asteroids are what allow people like the Red Chamber crew to make a living.

Thousand Peaks feels like a living, breathing space star system with multiple organizations, alliances, and groups of people in a way that I would find it supremely easy to adapt for a tabletop RPG, and that's amazing considering the game's run time.

Though the narrative pacing of the game feels perfectly fine, the chapter pacing is a little deceptive, but in a good way. Due to Jun's narrative comments wherever you go in the story, it becomes increasingly apparent in the second half of the game that he wishes he had noticed something, or that they had never done something else. The game gives you a set number of stylized pips that light up every time you start a chapter, and you can see there are seven of them, so you kind of assume the really bad thing that separates Jun and Eda will happen in the last one.

It's actually in the second to last, and when the player is already in the middle of a different crisis that the characters are (just barely) managing. When the crew leave the comet Banshee after having nearly been killed both arriving and leaving, Eda proposes her plan to go after its twin, Phoenix, in her all-consuming quest to find her master. She plans to jettison Jun out with the cargo hold since it doubles as an escape pod while she and Remi chase after Phoenix. Once at Phoenix, Remi is to give her an hour, and if she doesn't return, to then leave without her. Due to their fuel situation, there's a good chance they won't be able to escape Phoenix before it draws too close to the black hole it orbits, but waiting means the comet won't return for decades.

Aside from the fact it's odd she doesn't place the same priority on Remi's safety as Jun's (which I'm surprised Remi doesn't even bring up), it quickly becomes clear that Eda is willing to die for the chance to discover the truth, but both Remi and Jun talk her out of her, and seeing the effect her decision has on them, she backs down. An unexpected deescalation, but we still have one more chapter pip to go.

The player is asked to set course for the nearest waystation, the game ticks off fuel like the ship's on its way, but that's when the debris coma around Banshee strikes the ship. It's really busy with the player taking control of all three characters at one point or another as they battle to put out the onboard flames and Eda remains alone on the bridge as the Red Chamber reveals its status is bad enough that it recommends beginning abandonment proceedings.

When Jun tells Eda he found Remi unconscious and they can't get back to the bridge due to another fire being in the way, we think Eda is going to guide them to her. She's the captain and they look to her for orders, and she gives them, having Jun wall off the flaming parts of the ship so she can open them to the vacuum and then carry Remi up to safety into the cargo hold where they can seal and protect themselves. I admit, I didn't realize it the moment they got inside, because I was so distracted by the fire and Eda had agreed to give up on Phoenix, but honestly I don't think she had any way to join them.

This made it hit very hard when Jun circled back to Eda's fear that he wouldn't put down his duty to his clan decades down the road to accompany her when Phoenix returns, and of course at that point, I realized she wasn't going to make it, and this was why he is coming to the unknown world (actually a comet) at the start of the game after having retired as clan leader. He's come to fulfill his promise to join Eda on Phoenix.

The narrative piles on the hurt with Jun telling her how she and Remi could wait with him in East Ocean where he'll make sure they're well cared for, because we know how this turns out, and Eda at this point already knows she's going to be ejecting them. By the time Jun realizes what she's going to do, he can do nothing to stop her, and Eda uses the last of the Red Chamber's strength to chase Phoenix.

This takes us back to our frame story, and honestly I would have been fine if we never knew if she made it. Jun has no reason to believe she did, even though he revisits Thousand Peaks time and again over the coming decades seeking word of Phoenix. And if she hadn't, I think she would have liked it if he had made the journey in her place.

But then the actual final chapter plays and we see Eda did make it, discovered the body of her mentor, and was able to say good-bye. Through the metaphysical properties of lumen, the elderly Jun of the present is able to sense her past self and the game finishes with him following the same path Eda took to find her mentor, but in the other direction, leading him to the remains of the Red Chamber, surrounded by a sea of edalune flowers like the one around her home that she promised to take him to.

By this time, I knew the entire story. I had caught up with Old Jun. I knew both his youth spent in Thousand Peaks and what happened in the years after. I knew that Remi had passed away before Phoenix's return, apologizing that she wouldn't be able to join him, and I knew that Jun's intention was to find Eda's body and bury her beside her sister.

Watching elderly Jun begin running without his cane, tripping and falling as he climbs the hill to the Red Chamber made me wonder if he ever moved on from her, or would he, as the last member of the Red Chamber crew, request to be buried with them when he too passed on? (A part of me thinks he wouldn't, mostly because of his clan, but also because he knows how Remi was sensitive about him coming between her and Eda, unless things changed between them in the intervening decades.)

I wasn't sure how the frame story would end, since it would be simply too depressing to end with him finding her remains, and instead concluding with the callback to her promise to show him a field of flowers was really the pitch perfect ending.

There's really only one complaint I have about the game and it's that Edalune's own character arc doesn't conclude in a sensible fashion. This may be because it wraps up in scenes that Jun can't possibly know about since Eda would not have had a chance to tell him, and thus it's possible that what we see is just a lumen-fueled jumble mixed with his imagination.

Basically, Eda's hang up is that she's unable to see her own self-worth, but values herself in comparison to those she aspires to be. When she was training to be a witch, she literally didn't care if it meant becoming a weapon of war as long as she was allowed to catch up with the other girls of her class. When her mentor began looking after her, she wanted to become just like her (which her mentor did not like, since the older witch hated the way the mining company used her).

When the Red Chamber is fatally damaged by Banshee's coma and Jun asks what to do while he's holding an unconscious Remi, Eda's arc comes to a close as she supposedly realizes now, after all this time, that chasing after her mentor wasn't the path she wanted for her nor the way to find her own path to becoming a witch. Thus she prioritizes the safety of her crew instead of forcing the journey to Phoenix and ejects them to safety. But then the game up-ends her saving them by immediately having her use her last moments to chase after her mentor anyway.

Aside from that bump right before the final chapter, it was good. Really good.

Oddly, I found myself tearing up more after I finished the game and started reflecting on it than when I played the ending the first time. This is one of the few games which I would just call beautiful and one of the few that I played a second time immediately after my first.

It's a different experience, seeing how things play out a second time. Now that Old Jun and I are both on the same page makes the foreshadowing weigh all the more heavily. But I also wanted to find all those moments and mementos I missed the first time, because like Jun I wanted to hold on to all the memories I could.