Given that there are games from the past that didn’t necessarily get their full due the first time, I don’t mind the movement to remaster a portion of them and potentially introduce them to new audiences. That being said, not all titles necessarily deserve more time in the sun, or if you’re going to bring them back perhaps more care should be taken in making sure they’re ready for prime time. In the case of A Rite from the Stars, it feels like the case of a middling game being brought forward with too little attention paid to making the most of the opportunity.

When reading the game description it really hypes up its variety, depth, different endings, and more. Where the rubber meets the road when you’re actually playing it though? It instead reads as a game with great ambition that isn’t properly realized when it comes to critical details. First among them? Having puzzles that make intuitive sense or that help set you up for success. More often than not I simply couldn’t figure out what the game wanted me to do, a problem further exacerbated by a hint system that also did a horrible job of being helpful. It may be the case that the game’s promise of different paths with different mechanics served to allow me to choose its most poorly-implemented one first, which did it no favors, but I’ve played too many adventure and puzzle games that were more intuitive and engaging to believe I should settle for this.

Other aspects do little to help, as the mechanics geared towards action are also pretty poor. Granted, this may not be a dedicated platformer, but if you’re going to include some in the game it needs to feel better than this, especially if it has been “remastered”. I’d say the same of some of the other more action-oriented elements you’ll run into. It’s nice to have variety, but if the controls and the quality of play are pretty wildly inconsistent, it doesn’t inspire much confidence. It also doesn’t help that at launch the sliders for all sound settings are inexplicably set to zero, so until I wondered why everything was silent (I wasn’t sure at first whether it was deliberate), went into the settings, and turned it on myself the overall experience was also lacking in that area as well.

Pulling all of this together, it’s hard not to be frustrated with this effort. Mix together what feels like an ambitious-but-flawed original title with a remastering effort that feels both incomplete and poorly tested, and it actively gets in the way of its own success. I’d hope a patch will come along shortly to at least address the obvious sound setting issue, but some care put into improving the basics of the experience could go a long way as well. I applaud the obvious ambition of the original game, but failing to get core fundamentals refined, to make the experience more approachable, short-circuits the potential for its success.