It’s been said, by many people, that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. To some degree, that can be true: after all, if a product, design or style wasn’t worth copying, then it would be ignored. As KMFDM put it: Let’s stop saying, “Don’t quote me,” because if no one quotes you you probably haven’t said a thing worth saying. But when you seem to lose your own personal mark in the quest to imitate, then you’ve totally lost the thread. For Star Overdrive, an ambitious adventure from Caracal Games, they are constantly on the edge of falling into a chasm of being a clone of one of the biggest Nintendo adventures to date, Breath of the Wild. Thankfully, they never fully devolve into being a knockoff, but there are times where you wonder what would happen if they had.

You are Bios. Bios is a dude floating in a spaceship, just trying to enjoy being a twenty something with a sweet space pad and some kind of video game system. Suddenly, Bios gets a message: it’s from Nous, his girlfriend who I think has been stranded for, like, a decade? Anyways, Nous lets Bios know that things have gone south on the planet Cebete where she’d been doing important research and she needs help, or support, or something.

It’s all very cryptic and flowery language that ends with Nous reminding Bios “WE ARE ONE.” Bios, naturally, crashlands onto the wild planet, grabs his trusty keytar from the wreckage, and soon finds Nous’ hoverboard, which doubles as a jetpack. If this all sounds like a stream of consciousness flowing from someone who watched Xanadu while huffing bath salts, congratulations! You’ve unlocked the creative process that made this story. Maybe.

Let’s get ready to shoot through this space portal to do a sick benihana before smashing into a rock!

To begin with, the comparison to Breath of the Wild comes in many shades, but I want to be clear that I’m in no way being derisive of Star Overdrive. Some of the central concepts are similar: you do have a very large map to explore, you find “shrines” where you can unlock new abilities, and there’s an overarching flavor of puzzles, larger-than-life combat and a silent protagonist searching for a woman who communicates through long-ago recorded missives. Bios will discover raw materials that he uses to craft upgrades for the hoverboard, and cassette tapes that both give you more soundtrack options and also playback notes from Nous during her time before bad stuff happened.

In fact, it’s almost impressive how quickly this title draws you into the world and the atmospheric palpability of its core ideology. While the items above might sound hokey, everything has a synergy about it that resonates with what I believe Star Overdrive is trying to tell us. For example, your exit from the narrow valley where you’ve arrived into the vast, unforgiving landscape is truly awesome, in the classic sense of the word. As you’re attempting to figure out how exactly you’re going to explore this massive terrain, the hoverboard appears seemingly out of nowhere, complete with a video from Nous explaining that it was sent to find you in the event that she was hurt or worse. Her connection to Bios through a psychic wavelength fully explains how the story is unfolding without ever needing to give you a deliberate “why.”

Though her notes and leading storytelling is, inargubly, helpful.

One thing that came more naturally than not is the crafting, an aspect of games that I traditionally shy away from. The landscape is peppered with different elements that you need to collect to cobble together gradual but substantial upgrades for your hoverboard, and the hunt for them is neverending but also not overwhelming. At every point, the game will provide ample different opportunities for pickup and gathering, and the trek to the workshop (which has its own bit of delightful animation) is never too far out of the way. Most importantly, Star Overdrive lets you know of the importance of crafting without beating you over the head with it, a tonal difference from the majority of games where I have to keep gluing things together till my eyes glaze over.

The puzzles that you encounter will be a major part of the gameplay, so I hope that you don’t mind trying to work out logic and physics based concepts as new mechanics are peppered in. Nous provides some colorful information about her own experience and the history of the planet, but never says “you have to use these blocks to unlock this door” or anything helpful. The quest/progress guide will help you understand the general tone of what you need to do next, but the step-by-step instructions are lacking and can leave a player wondering what the hell to do next. There’s nothing too obtuse, thankfully, but your fleeting time on Cebete will be mostly spent trying to put tab A into slot B in order to move into the next area, and it can be distracting.

Building an energy slingshot while my keytar looks like a Proton Pack. Regular protagonist stuff.

When I say “fleeting,” I don’t mean that this’ll be a two hour indie adventure where we learn the whole thing is an allegory to the Boxer Rebellion, but you might imagine, upon seeing trailers or stills, that you’re in for a huge, epic experience that’ll take you weeks, if not months. In truth, if you cut out the noise and focus on the storyline, we’re talking a conservative eight hours, possibly ten if you’re really hunting for additional crafting upgrades. That certainly isn’t a pithy amount, but it’s far less than you may anticipate given its appearance. I didn’t feel like I lost anything, but it made me realize that the map, though large it may look, was actually fairly condensed and easily traversable.

From there, the aspects of Star Overdrive have their ups and downs as they unfold. The attacks from the keytar, for example, are a delicious bit of combat for a majority of the enemy population. Being able to work out timings for strikes, slashes and dodge dashing are essential to survival, as Cebete is apparently a very hostile environment. The game is not shy about punishing you for entering into a location where you might not be ready, and the game over screens appear with unforgiving repetition until you’re able to get your head about you. In that factor, though, I do think that the player could have been respawned somewhere a little further away from aggressive mobs: it’s not fun to wake up and be attacked almost immediately, with very little time to figure out how to survive this time around.

Sure, I could turn and flee, but where’s the fun in that?

The movement system is also something that, when it works well, captures the very soul of Star Overdrive. Much more of an explorative trip than anything else, you’ll spend a massive amount of time flying around on the hoverboard, doing positively sick jumps off anything and everything while slowly collecting items to better upgrade the core of the board to handle terrains like water and metal more successfully. When you’re at your peak form – either early on or after the vehicle is more refined – the sensation is indescribably excellent. It takes the thrill of success that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater offers and combines it with the sprawling magnitude you’d hope to find in a open world game. It’s easily the best aspect of the entire game, which is good, because you’ll be doing it a lot.

But when you combine the two – the fighting and the moving – you get a sort of attempted fluidity that doesn’t always work to the degree you’d hope. A majority of the boss battles – massive beings called Pulse Wraiths – ask you to be nimble on your toes and affirmed in your actions. This means you’re getting dumped into a lot of big name fights where not a lot is explained beforehand, if anything, and you’re just sort of trying to work it out on the fly. Like I said before, you usually respawn right in front of wherever you just died, so trying to flee and think over what just happened is easier said than done. Once you can discover the key to victory, the end result comes easily, but it’s the lead up to that where players will get disarmed, particularly by the camera work.

It took me far, far too long to piece together how to beat this boss.

This isn’t something that happens to everyone, but I occasionally get motion sick when playing titles that function in a certain way. I generally avoid first person games as a result, though slower paced things usually can be mitigated and enjoyed. Yet Star Overdrive is one of the first non-FPS titles I’ve played where I ended up flat on my back, breathing deeply and trying not to vomit. The constant, circular motions made with some bosses, particularly the first I encountered in the Hunting Grounds area, just did me in something fierce. I don’t have a suggestion for how to improve this, because, up to this point, the game looked and felt amazing, and I genuinely wanted to keep soldiering on. But if I have to choose between helping Bios rescue his girlfriend and keeping my meals in my stomach, the doctor says I need to do the second one.

And it DOES look amazing. The Switch is very long in the tooth, and the time where Star Overdrive will be a Switch exclusive is limited, but my God, if it doesn’t look a sight. I’ve been accustomed to first party titles working wonders and sparkling on this older handheld, but Caracal Games did some express magic to put everything together and get it to pop. From sparse plantlife to the undulating actions of the massive Wraiths, their attention to detail and love in how the game presents itself. There are no draw distances to worry about, no roughness where things just sort of pop into view apropos of anything. The screenshots do not do it justice, and I’m genuinely impressed with the design and presentation, and I’m almost envious how it may look on even more upgraded hardware.

Yes, I bugged out and ended up drowning under the landscape, but it was certainly a sight to see.

Lastly, I cannot get over the soundtrack. From the very first notes, Star Overdrive has built an environment of sound that paints an aural picture of distance, longing, hope and curiosity. The music is so synth heavy and complex it felt like the soundtrack to my favorite sci-fi movie of the 1980s. It’s cosmic and deliberately heavy at times, and it takes pains to accentuate the tone of whatever is happening on the screen. It can delve into heavy guitar motifs during combat and some more melancholy, orchestral moments during reveals, but most of what you’ll be hearing is evocative and powerful, attuning you to the heart and mind of Bios and Nous as he desperately fights back against evil and decay to try to at least find the remnants of his beloved.

That, perhaps, is the greatest takeaway from the entire ordeal: the love. However much you may roll your eyes at the classic trope of a boy coming to the rescue of a girl, there’s such genuine emotion in the notes that Nous has left for Bios. There’s some brilliant voice acting done by Nous, which must fill the silence that Bios creates as he refrains from making a single noise throughout the journey. But she longs for him, she holds his heart dear, and his determination and steadfast movement through hostile, unknown dangers to find her again speak volumes without a word. It’s not a perfect title, but it’s wonderfully memorable, and I highly encourage anyone and everyone to take a chance on Star Overdrive. The beauty is simple, in the end: Bios and Nous are one, and that drives their entire future to the stars and beyond.

Star Overdrive is available now on Nintendo Switch and on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on June 19th.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Star Overdrive was provided by the publisher.