How do you add a new story to a sweeping RPG? That’s the tricky conundrum that faced Sea of Stars developer Sabotage Studio. Some games choose to continue the story, bolting it onto the back of the game and giving you new hyper powerful abilities at the same time, or it’s joined on at the side and has to face the tricky balancing act of creating new progression that doesn’t impact too heavily on the tail end of the main story. Sea of Stars: Throes of the Watchmaker straddles this divide, coming as both a post-game adventure and branching off to explore a separate, miniaturised clockwork world.
That’s right, we’re getting all Honey, Shrunk the Kids for this one. Answering the call for help from the crew of The Verspertine, and with Keenathan in a particular kind of existential crisis, the one person who can help them solve Keenathan’s troubles seems to be the Watchmaker. Once you arrive at her Clockwork Castle, she agrees to help, but only if you help her first to resolve a fearful state of affairs in the miniature world of Horloge that she created.
You see, this charming little world, filled with clockwork denizens, has been twisted and corrupted, brought under the power of an evil twin to the Watchmaker, known as The Puppeteer, making her fearful ever to return. It’s up to Valere and Zale to shrink themselves down and head into this clockwork circus world of Horloge to free it from The Puppeteer’s rule.
It doesn’t take long to run into The Puppeteer and her comedic clown duo of goons, Pif & Pouf, doing battle and discovering, not only that the Solstice Warrior abilities of Valere and Zale have next to no power here, but also that this power can simply be whisked away from them and transformed into evil twins of themselves. It takes the Artificer’s new beam abilities to release everyone from their imprisonment, becoming a new playable character and permanent battle companion in the process, and it takes a fellow prisoner to explain that Valere and Zale will need to lean in and play some new circus-like roles in order to succeed.
Valere becomes an acrobat and Zale a juggler, with Arty bringing their own spin on circus acts alongside. Zale’s juggling attacks deal fire damage with a side helping of “bonk”, which is represented by a rubber mallet symbol, while Valere’s bonk comes with a side of magic, and Arty has beam attacks. Of course, there’s also all of the special abilities and combo attacks, and it’s here that the circus flair really comes to the fore. Valere launches herself into the sky on a pole vault, Zale juggles flaming balls off enemy faces, Arty bounces cannon balls or Valere and Zale of a trampoline, and there’s all the restorative properties of a cream pie to the face if you want Zale to heal an ally… or himself, I guess.
There’s the same rhythm to the turn-based combat here, where timing button presses increases the damage of an attack or extends the move for successive hits. At the same time, there’s a strategic layer of attacking certain enemies that have damage type ‘locks’ that can knock them out of turn order if you hit them with the right damage types enough times.
As a post-game addition, this is intended to be more challenging than the base game, making the importance of timing hits, blocks and breaking enemy locks all the more important. However, you do still have the Relics system that can tweak and modify the difficulty and certain other game elements. This can give you additional health, restore HP after battle instead and/or after levelling up (which is on by default), add a timing success indicator, and more. I do, as someone that’s not played an awful lot of the main game, wish that timing indicators were more deeply ingrained, perhaps giving a measure of whether you’re early, late or on time, but I can appreciate the game not wanting to hold your hand too much.
The clockwork world is quite delightfully realised by Sabotage Studio, really leaning in on this being a miniaturised land. All of the denizens have a wind-up key spinning from their backs, the town of Horloge is filled with circus tents that have a handful of circus minigames in them – such as needing to pole vault through large hoops against the clock – and as you explore you now gather restorative items from little milk tubs and cobs of corn that become popcorn.
There’s the same style of free traversal through the maze-like environments as well, clambering up ledges and ladders, grappling and leaping across gaps, and following paths that wrap around, through and under other parts of the scenery. It makes finding secrets and solving environmental puzzles satisfying and engaging.
And all that care and attention paid once more to the pixel art world is complimented by a bunch of catchy bops from Sabotage’s composer Eric W. Brown and guest composer Yasunori Mitsuda, and more gorgeously animated cinematics – Sabotage say these had the same budget as the main game.
Honestly, all of this could easily have been paid DLC, but for the fact that this was promised as a stretch goal from Sea of Stars’ original crowdfunding campaign. That it is a free addition to the game, coming after major updates that added 3-player co-op (which is playable throughout this DLC), overhauled combat and more, just makes it all the more special.
