Summary
The violence is odd inStellar Blade. Enemies have grotesque designs with squelching tentacles that spurt blood when hacked off, but it feels so stylised and over the top that it never seems all that graphic, despite how it sounds on paper (or screens. I assume you didn’t print this article off to show your friends). If you did, thanks, I guess. And when Eve dies, she just falls to the floor and the screen goes black - witha couple of platforming deaths the exception. But if you look a little closer, there are some incredibly violent deaths happening off screen.
Throughout Stellar Blade, most of the people you meet are dead. While you have a couple of companions, and there is a hub world with a larger cast, most of Eve’s time is spent exploring abandoned and dangerous areas. Here, she finds the aforementioned squid monsters, and the also aforementioned dead bodies. Some of these offer upgrades in the form of cores, if they are ‘angels’ like Eve, but most are regular humans. They occasionally have a keycard or password, but mostly they’re just there for world-building. Extremely dark world-building.
Stellar Blade’s NPC Messages Paint A Haunting Picture
These bodies tend to be soldiers rather than civilians, and their uniforms are equipped with black boxes that capture their last words. This is often where the passwords feature - these soldiers die with duty on their minds and leave help for those who would come after. Others see themselves as historians, documenting the destruction they witness so that when Eve comes by later, she knows what happened, what killed them, and what might await her in the next room. The most heartbreaking, though, lack this soldier’s constitution and die as people.
One man, found floating lifelessly in the water, spent his last words screeching for help as he could not swim. Stumbling across him in a hidden area that only really exists for Eve to grab a few rare resources in reward for exploring is one of the rare times the game captures the humanity at its heart. Too often, Stellar Blade gets caught up in its convoluted plot delivered inflat exposition by Eve’s personalityless monotone.
Some, like soldiers of our own earthly wars, write poetry as the light fades, hoping to leave behind some mark of their humanity on a cold and wretched world. Some leave messages for their children, convincing themselves they will be found and passed on some day. Some apologise to the empty air, desperate for absolution before judgement. One man reaches out in the darkness to find his friend, only to discover he is already dead.
Stellar Blade doesn’t pay its own world enough mind, which is often most noticeable in Eve’slack of agency or awareness of her own appearance. Even the characters we meet bounce between idle and inane chatter and being wrapped up in the needlessly complex aspects of the plot. If you want to find humanity here, you’ll need to search for it.
These may not be violent in the typical sense. None of the ones I found featured someone screaming in pain as their body was slashed in two. But there’s a quiet, inevitable violence throughout the game of a world struggling with the dangers it does not understand, let alone be equipped to defend against. It’s in these dead bodies left behind that we finally see a glimpse of a world that is alive.
Stellar Blade
WHERE TO PLAY
Stellar Blade is an action-driven game from Shift Up, originally revealed as Project Eve. It follows the aforementioned Eve as she battles the alien Naytiba invaders, in a bid to reclaim the Earth for humanity.
