Galaxy Prince – Vampire Star was not a pleasant experience. The theme is heavy: expect a story about abuse, manipulation, trauma, self-harm, etc., and expect it to jump head-on into that story. These things are not implied or discussed through a veil of metaphor; they are not themes. They are the whole of the story, the whole of the game. Having said that, hopefully this review discusses these things in detail as well, so please take note before reading further.
Of course, the same prompt is given before you start playing, but in many ways, it’s beyond the scope of content warnings. My first reaction to Prince of the Galaxy was that, after finishing it in a grim sit-down, I wondered why this game exists—why anyone, in fact, should even play it. Even apart from being unpleasant, Prince of the Galaxy’s description is literally aggressive. Step into first person and you experience all of the gameplay directly, leaving behind something that at least you can describe as a three-hour trauma simulator.
Why do it, why play it? The simple answer is moral: video games should address difficult issues like abuse or trauma, and their representation in the media is itself a moral good. The concept is popular, but it’s only half right, and it’s clumsy. A wrong description can do more harm than good. What’s more, even the right type is limited – representing for representation can limit the game to the role of a messenger, delivering a message to you through canonical, didactic fables. In that case, what would be the message of the Galactic Prince? There is nothing that any rational person does not know.
I think the real answer is technology. Galaxy Prince is the work of Italian developer Lorenzo Redaelli and his micro-studio Eyeguys. It’s his first game, originally made for his college dissertation and first released on Steam in 2020, only now coming to consoles. And, even ignoring the fact that it’s a debut, it’s something superb.Superb because by mastering the technique you can skip the teaching style of storytelling and explore. Dig and challenge. This is good stuff.
You play as Prince Galactic as Nuki, a young man who has always longed to find and fall in love with his Galactic Prince, a legendary lover who seems to have fallen from the stars and landed on his lap, inviting him on a quest to fix the universe. Soon, you meet Sune, a quintessentially sad boy, drawn in manga style (Redaelli cites manga artist Suehiro Maruo and anime film director Masaaki Yusaka as inspiration), delicate, dangerous, damaged, Nuki’s manga Intoxicating combination. You’re stuck in a completely flawed version of love. In many ways, what happens next is less important than how.
Nuki and Sune’s relationship is swift and vicious. As Nuki, you’ll work your way through waves of inner monologue, consistent self-doubt, depression, self-loathing. You’ll wake up repeatedly in your room, gazing at the ever-changing sky, changing and expanding with the intensity of your obsession. In your room, there are six things to interact with, adventure play style. Nursery rhyme books with open stories on the shelf for you to re-read. You can bang bang on the piano and gradually develop the appropriate melancholy tune. You’ve got a pet starfish to murmur to, and a bathroom with pills you’ve never taken, a leftover bottle of perfume, a toothbrush, and — ominously — a razor .
The seemingly small choices made with something like this would branch off the story of Prince of the Galaxy. Before what day will you use your last bit of perfume? Do you shave, the way Sune apparently likes? Can you take medicine? What’s more important is the dialogue you choose, branching, but also subtly capricious. For Nuki and you, Sune is a puzzle to be solved, with a few lines to choose from before his sudden rejection, easy and counterintuitive offense. Nuki’s response to this is growing desperation, wanting Sune’s love while also trying to save him from himself – Sune is literally and figuratively a star destined for a supernova. Nucky’s biggest flaw is the belief that not only can he stop the sudden explosion, but he’s also responsible for it.
Nuki’s struggles, and the aftermath of its spiraling out of control, are maddening, if almost unbearable to witness. But again, what matters here is the way it is. Redaelli played with form relentlessly. For example, dialogue often changes as you work—options repeat, repeat, or disappear in front of you, and they squirm out of your hands when you think you’ve caught the right word. Sometimes you need to tap the same response over and over, sometimes that’s all you’re presenting, and sometimes you see your response from the other side, twisted and blurred, twisted into a reality that is tragically impossible to see.
The simplest shapes and colors—a few concentric circles, a red shock on black, a drawing of a 2D character that zooms quickly or slowly rotates in the air—can produce extraordinary, oversized results.
The voice is also indeterminate, shifting from a soft lullaby to a suppressed, perfectly deployed silence to a piercing attack. Most striking is what Redaelli is able to do with an ostensibly limited set of tools. Galaxy Prince is mostly two-dimensional, sometimes transporting you into your room or Sune’s 3D space, but rarely moving you around. But the simplest shapes and colors—a few concentric circles, a red shock on black, a collision zoom, or a drawing of a 2D character spinning slowly in the air—can produce extraordinary, oversized effects.
All of these come together most effectively in the most uncharted territory of video games: sex. Seeming to be the last frontier of a medium, at least in its mainstream media that feels trapped in late adolescence, the sexuality in Prince of the Galaxy is handled with Impressionist metaphors but a decidedly provocative one. Two stars orbiting each other, in front of the sun in a constellation form, test you with a kind of consent questionnaire and active check: will you love me forever? Will you always protect me? As the story progresses, a series of recurring questions changes, from a gentle mantra, to manipulative phrasing, to overt coercion.
Each time is followed by five rotating symbols, representing the senses. Pick one to simply sense or do something you can barely predict – thinking about the texture of Sune’s tongue, opening his eyes during a kiss, wondering if you should try biting his neck. These are often dark or absurd vignettes in Prince of the Galaxy, but also most effectively capture the truly weird, awkward self-awareness of what humans think at their most intimate and revealing. This is a special kind of deliberate absurdity that requires really mature thinking.
Most importantly, that’s why playing Prince of the Galaxy, and why it exists. Games in this genre can sometimes feel like a kind of “development as healing,” where creators exorcise demons by retelling personal traumas. It can be an all-around powerful experience; at times, it can also feel a little rude. Prince of the Galaxy moves somewhere and it resonates and ideally challenges its audience. But subject matter aside, you should play this, because you might be watching the early, jagged short stories of a great director, or reading a favorite author’s first combative, hundred-page novel: Experience a Splurge on talent as they start to discover what they can do.