Asterigos: Curse of the Stars

One of the best-upvoted reviews Asterigos: Curse of the Stars has ever received sums it up better than most critics have managed since: "Mix Dark Souls and Immortals Fenyx Rising together, then add a dash of bugs, a sprinkle of questionable design choices and a pinch of easy mode, and you'll get Asterigos." That's from launch day, October 2022, and — apart from the bugs, mostly patched out since — it's remained an accurate description for four years running.

A setting worth the trip

The city of Aphes, suspended among the stars after a mysterious curse, is the game's clearest success. Rather than defaulting to Norse mythology or a generic medieval fantasy palette, Asterigos builds its world from Greek and Roman myth — a genuinely underused wellspring in an action RPG landscape crowded with Viking gods — and renders it in a vibrant, high-contrast art style multiple reviewers single out even when they're otherwise unimpressed. Combat backs it up in short sessions: swapping between paired weapon sets (spear-and-shield, twin daggers, hammer-and-chain) feels responsive, and a proper difficulty slider means the "Souls-like" tag some reviewers push back on doesn't have to define the experience — you can turn the challenge down and just enjoy exploring Aphes.

The complaint nobody fixed

Here's where four years of patches should have mattered, and mostly didn't. The single most-upvoted review on the entire page — 509 votes, posted the day the game launched — is a refund notice over one specific, basic problem: no option to remap keybinds on PC. That's not a subjective design choice; it's a missing feature genre convention has treated as table stakes for a decade. Nine numbered updates followed through December 2023, and a review from as recently as December 2025 is still describing "complete rubbish" controls that don't meaningfully improve between mouse-and-keyboard and controller. Whatever those nine patches addressed, this wasn't fixed in any way players are still noticing.

The second recurring complaint is navigation. There's no functional map or compass worth the name, and reviewers across 2022, 2023, and 2026 alike describe getting lost in "samey" level design and backtracking through maze-like areas without guidance. One January 2023 review, at 55 votes, notes this directly extended their playtime from a reasonable length to fifty hours — not because there was fifty hours of content, but because navigating it took that long. For a linear-ish action RPG rather than an intentionally disorienting Metroidvania, that's a design gap rather than a stylistic choice.

Story and presentation don't carry their half

Multiple reviewers who otherwise recommend the game are unsparing about its writing. Lead character Hilda gets called "forgettable and whiny" in one 239-vote review, and the plot — a search for a missing father in a cursed city — doesn't do much to distinguish itself once you're a few hours in. Partial voice acting compounds the problem: by one reviewer's estimate only around a tenth of dialogue is voiced, creating an inconsistent presentation that pulls attention away from scenes rather than grounding them. None of this sinks the game — the combat and setting carry it further than the writing does — but it means Asterigos never becomes more than the sum of its combat encounters, and several reviewers describe exactly that ceiling: a strong first impression that doesn't sustain itself across a full playthrough.

Support stopped in 2023, and recent sentiment shows it

The developer's post-launch record is genuinely good by indie standards through its first fourteen months: nine numbered updates, a paid "Call of the Paragons" boss-content DLC in February 2023, and an anniversary Q&A stream that October. Then, after Update 1.09 in December 2023, the news feed becomes sale announcements and nothing else. Nearly three years without a content or fix update is a long time for known, launch-week issues to sit unaddressed.

The review data reflects that gap plainly. The 100 most recent English reviews — spanning 2025 into 2026 — run only 65% positive, a real drop from the 76.7% lifetime English figure. That's not a controversy or a scandal; it reads as a well-liked game whose unaddressed rough edges have become more noticeable as the genre around it has kept moving while Asterigos hasn't.

Is it actually a Souls-like?

Part of what makes Asterigos hard to place is that its marketing and its community tags lean into the "Souls-like" label harder than the actual game commits to it. Several reviewers push back on the comparison directly, arguing the better reference points are Immortals Fenyx Rising for the open, climbable world and Kingdoms of Amalur for the combat's weapon-pairing structure — both noticeably gentler, more forgiving games than anything from FromSoftware. The included difficulty slider settles the argument in practice: this is a game that wants Souls-curious players who don't want Souls-level punishment, and on those terms it succeeds. A late-2025 Korean review, translated and still carrying real weight at 23 votes, calls this out from the opposite direction — arguing the game's own "Potion Buffet" healing generosity "destroys all tension," which is a fair complaint if you came in wanting the genre's usual stakes rather than its usual shape. Both readings are correct for different audiences; knowing which one you are before buying will save some frustration either way.

Value

At NZ$49.99, Asterigos sits at a fair-but-unremarkable price for what it delivers, and the discount history tells the more useful story: 30% off within four months of launch, 45% by the following December, and up to 60% off in more recent sales. Buying during one of those windows turns a decent game with real flaws into genuinely good value — the combat and setting are worth several evenings at a steep discount even if the navigation and writing never improve.

Verdict

Asterigos: Curse of the Stars picked a genuinely interesting setting and built combat good enough to carry a shorter playthrough, and that's real, durable value the game still delivers four years later. What holds it at a 6.5 rather than higher is how little of its launch-week feedback the developer acted on — the keybind and navigation complaints from October 2022 are, in substance, the same complaints showing up in December 2025 reviews. Buy it on sale for a fast, good-looking mythology romp, and don't expect either the quality-of-life gaps or the thin story to have gotten any better since launch, because the review data says they haven't.