I am trapped in a Stellar Blade purgatory. I’m not torn between the Heaven and Hell of its ethereal action set-pieces and damnation delivering jiggle physics – this is a purgatory of my own making. Maybe it’s less purgatory and wherever that hill Sisyphus had to roll the rock up was. I’m hearing now that the hill was in Tartarus. I’m also hearing that Tartarus is basically purgatory for Greek mythology. So, as I was saying, I am trapped in a Stellar Blade purgatory.
I beat Stellar Blade while reviewing it, fighting Providence as part of my chosen ending. Providence is a hard boss fight. Being a games journalist, I died. I think it took until my fourth or fifth attempt to beat Providence, but eventually, I emerged victorious. I saw the cutscenes, got the Trophy, and moved on with my life. Stellar Blade was a game with potential, but had all the trappings of ‘the sequel will be better’. I didn’t expect to be going back to it. Then it got an update.
You Can’t Escape Stellar Blade’s Final Boss
When the Nier: Automata crossover dropped, I reinstalled Stellar Blade to check it out. All of the talk was about the revealing costumes, but that was how it went for the main game too, and I knew there was more to it. But when I loaded the game up, I was back in the last safe area before Providence. You don’t get to save afterwards – it’s just cutscenes and credits, so that made sense. You also can’t leave this area because you’re now locked into the choices you’ve made, which also makes sense. And you can’t reload an earlier save. This makes no sense.
Possibly to stop people from saving before the decisive choice to get both endings in one playthrough, and possibly just because of a developmental oversight, Stellar Blade has a single save file. This means I can’t reload to an earlier save in the open world, and unlike some games, beating the boss doesn’t throw you back into the vast emptiness to sweep things up, it just ends the game.
There is a New Game Plus option, but I don’t want to play the whole game over. I just want to run around and get into fights as Eve again. Finish some side quests here, grab some soda cans there. I know Stellar Blade considers itself a combat experience first and foremost, so making it a linear game with a distinct and permanent ending makes sense, but these updates cause issues – especially the latest Christmas one.
Stellar Blade’s Christmas Outfit Is All About Holiday Cheer
I wasn’t too fussed about the Nier update. I was minorly annoyed on a professional level – as a fan of both games, had I been able to explore it, I might have had some thoughts. But the costumes seemed to sway too far into fan service, the activities seemed dull and inconsequential, and as my colleague Jade King wrote about, the pack seemed to display a shallow understanding of Nier in the first place.
However, the latest surprise update is Christmas themed. I do love a good Christmas game, and we have so few of them. It’s why Astro Bot’s Winter Wonder was able to win me so thoroughly over this holiday season. While Nier came with thematic weight, Christmas is allowed to be meaningless fun. The sort of meaningless fun Stellar Blade could do with embracing, excelling when it was pulpy and dragging when it was existential.
There’s not a lot to the Christmas update, but then, there doesn’t need to be. Xion, the game’s hub city, has been kitted out with snowmen, Christmas trees, and all sorts of decorations. There are four smaller presents hidden around the city, and if you shoot them (this part, I admit, lacks some holiday cheer), you get Eve’s Christmas accessories, while a bigger present hides her outfit. That’s all there is to it, and given the outfit looks exactly as you’d expect it to, I recognise that it’s a little pathetic to bemoan not being able to see the anime lady in themed underwear.
But more to the point, it’s odd that Stellar Blade takes a hardline stance on not being able to jump back in after beating the game, then months after launch gives away free updates that you can’t get unless you’re in the middle of things. It takes about a third of the game to reach Xion, so I’m not going to start a new game just to get there, and I can’t imagine many other people will either. It really is purgatory – I’m locked out of paradise.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
82/100
- Released
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April 26, 2024
- Developer(s)
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Shift Up
- Publisher(s)
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Sony Interactive Entertainment