Stellar Reflections

Gen AI is ethically and ecologically unviable. https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117

Always amazed by the effort put in to a lot of these free games.

"Minute of Islands" is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. This E-book features Choose-Your-Own-Adventure elements where you make some decisions that don't do anything to change the fact this is just an E-Book. Nobody finished reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because E-books aren't games. And neither is this. This is a really mediocre sci-fi themed high school anim…

This is an engaging little visual novel that is well worth reading. It kept my attention and made me want to keep reading. It is mostly linear and takes about an hour to read through. There are two points you have to make a decision which leads to the 3 different endings. I know there are a lot of problems with AI generated content but this is the type of case where I can see it makes sense. The fact that this game is free and they are open about their use of AI makes me think they are not trying to churn out something with AI to make a quick buck. Rather they had a vision of something they wanted to create but not the resources to bring it to life so using AI enabled them to make it a reality.

Stellar Reflections is a dystopian space Visual Novel with a really good story and neat background art that matches the mood of the story very well. There are three possible endings and [spoiler] holy crap is the bad ending dark [/spoiler] I enjoyed all three of them. There aren't a lot of choices in this VN just two, and those choices determine what ending you get. Thanks to the developer Badger Can Fly for putting this game up on Steam for free. Hopefully there will be more good games from them in the future.

Well, this one was short and.... The "good" ending reminded me of a Robert Heinlein novel I had read many years ago...and all I can recall was the less than satisfying feeling I have when I look back on it. Similar to that novel, this short VN went through a bunch of stuff well enough to keep me turning pages but in a few years time I'll probably be hard pressed to recall any of the prose or the plot. Somewhat tongue in cheek, I was enticed to read this on account of the trailer....and I completely forgot about the trailer by the time I finished all three endings. Since I can't give a neutral review, I flipped a coin and went with....