Stela Critic Reviews

Stela is an epic poem of a game that plucks at the heart and makes you yearn for a world that you never knew existed. It’s what this wonderful medium of gaming should strive towards, and for me it’s very nearly the perfect experience.

You won’t be disappointed in any way shape or form with this as a complete product. Production values throughout the short journey are spectacular and you get a sense when it’s all done that this is either the beginning of something longrunning and with expansive potential, or a complete one-off experience for the ages. Again, you’ll be the judge of that when the credits roll, but such is the virtue of what SkyLabs has created and completed here.

SkyBox Labs has done a great job with Stela when you look at it as a piece of art rather than a video game. That said, they haven’t messed up with the gameplay either. The only thing that could affect the beautiful art, the incredible music and the simple gameplay of Stela is the fact that it ends much sooner than it should.

When it comes to indie horror games, very few illustrate a living nightmare as well as Stela does.

Stela is an ok game, a snack while you're waiting for more consistent meals. If you're a fan of the platforming & puzzle combo, you should give it a try.

Stela is a very pleasant experience from the first moment. Beautiful visuals and soundtrack for a platformer adventure maybe too short, flat and excessively simple in terms of difficulty.

Despite of Stela has a powerful audiovisual section, its gameplay and narrative are so far away from it.

SkyBox Labs' Stela is a good title that shows off the undoubted abilities of its development team. It's not a masterpiece but bodes well for the future of the company that, after years of working behind the scenes, is ready to play a leading role.

Stela is good but unspectacular. It grabs your attention from the outset and packs a lot of tense and testing scenarios into its short running time. But there’s nothing overly compelling about it; nothing that elevates it from being just an inoffensive way to waste a couple of hours. It’s enjoyable, sure, but its short length and lack of wow factor makes it hard to recommended at full price. Still, if you really loved Limbo and know what Planet Alpha is, you might want to give Stela a go.

Stela is similarly brief but also a fleeting experience that doesn’t make much of an impact while you’re playing or linger once you complete it mostly due to its hollow world. Even its strongest parts — like its deliberate platforming and dazzling visual flair — are diluted elements from Limbo and Inside, two games that it pulls from in nearly every aspect that make the parallels unavoidable.

Stela follows the path of other cinematic platforming experiences like Limbo and Inside, but if forgets to add a new layer to the subgenre. It has great moments, and visually is awesome at times. Definitely, not a bad adventure, but it feels very short and predictable, like if you had played it before.

Including all unavoidable failures and retries, it only takes two hours to play Stela through. In that sense, the asking price of twenty bucks is a bit too steep. However, the game is well done and the gameplay focuses only on the essential as there’s nothing extra to distract you. There are plenty of similar games out here (Limbo, Inside and Little Nightmares to name a few) and despite somewhat unfortunately hollow emotional response, fans of the genre will find a competent puzzle-platformer in Stela. As of writing, no one has clocked the achievement for zero deaths during a playthrough so the game is a perfect challenge for die-hard completionists out there.

Stela is a fun experience, if short, and deserves a place up there with such titles as Limbo and Inside. Offering a large amount of depth and atmosphere is a plus and most people would likely find enjoyment from this title.

If you're into games for the experience more than the narrative, Stela might work for you. A few of the puzzles took more brute force than smarts to solve, but nothing was impossibly difficult. The idea of plane-jumping is good, except for when you can't tell if the feature is active. The graphics look beautiful, but the early levels suffer from too many dark colors muddying the waters. It's too bad that the set pieces lack anything special to connect them together. Overall, while Stela may not be top-tier material, it is solid enough to warrant a look.

Stela builds upon the Limbo foundations, but it ends up being too simplistic and doesn’t really use its distinctive features, like the 2’D design of some stages. That, and being quite short and not particularly replayable, makes it fall behind its competitors.

Slow paced jump&run with a beautiful world and some clever traps. Nonetheless you’re better off with Limbo and even more so with Inside.

Stela hopes you’ll look at it with the same reverence everyone had for Inside. The problem is that Stela needs to do a lot more than just copying Playdead’s formula. The major difference between both games is that Stela is unfocused. Skybox Labs has designed an interesting world with a handful of cool moments, but it could have been something more with a clearer objective and even a newer art style. I still think it’s worth devoting the 2-3 hours to finish, but if you’re hoping for the next Inside, you’re probably better off just playing more Inside.

A good first step, but it leaves us dumbfounded in too many moments and on too many points.

The trouble is that for all the power of its visuals, animation, and sometimes clever level design, Stela is never able to build toward anything with meaning.