Anime-Style ARPG Starlight Re:Volver Announces First Pre-Alpha Demo This March

The latest promising ARPG to enter the stacked genre, Starlight Re:Volver, will soon be letting players enter its brightly-colored gates. After premiering this past fall with an impressive trailer, it brought a new trailer to IGN Fan Fest announcing the first playtest that’ll allow the public to sign up and join the three-day session. 

The game is essentially Diablo or Path of Exile infused with a colorful modern “anime” style, letting players hack and slash through enemies and bosses with friends as powerful Divers, while collecting power-ups to enhance the characters’ toolkits. Between rounds, there are social multiplayer spaces that lets players join and hang out with others on a more casual basis. From gameplay previews on the Pahdo Labs’ socials, it seems players shouldn’t let the bright, cheery style disguise the fact that it’s a full-on ARPG. 

This playtest looks like it’ll tap into some of the game’s key features that have already been unveiled. So far, there’ll be two playable “Divers” named Effy and Kira, respectively a hammer-wielding melee character and a pistol-wielding moon-themed “idol,” as the other two seem to be undergoing “ability kit reworks” at the moment. Players will be able to customize these playable characters’ kits in order to take on “one incredibly difficult boss fight” through the single biome available for now.  

There’ll also be fishing, which is historically an important mini-game addition for any great RPG. A recent dev blog explained that any player using a lure will also attract more fish for other players, the weather and time of day affect the fish, and players will be able to track fish and craft items based on what they’ve caught, making it a mini-game for players to cooperate in at all hours of the day. 

Starlight Re:Volver also now features a cafe-owning NPC named Clover, voiced and partially designed by League of Legends streamer LilyPichu. The pre-alpha blog also touts a zero-tolerance ethos towards generative AI through its voiced trailer. 

The first keys for this pre-alpha demo will be going live through Steam via email invites, with communications primarily on the official Discord server.