With so many remakes and re-releases launching every month, there’s a good chance you’ll be playing something distinctly retro in 2025. Retro isn’t a word that we need to reserve for old games though, with plenty of games that are so inspired by the classics they fit neatly into that bracket. I personally love playing these old school experiences, so when Omega 6 The Triangle Stars came into my orbit (pun absolutely intended) I was excited to play this sci-fi throwback.
Set in the distant future, humanity has developed technology to live for hundreds and hundreds of years without fear of death. This alongside an influx of aliens living on earth means there’s a bit of a population crisis on our future planet, so our two protagonists Thunder and Kyla have been sent into space to find a new planet for earthlings to inhabit. This is easier said than done, but after four hundred years of space travel and stasis they might just have found a potential place.
This new planet will take some credits to set up, and because of this the dynamic duo are looking for ways to make some money. After a space flyer hits their ship advertising treasure hunters wanted, they decide this is as good an option as any and head to Impostar. This planet is a part of The Triangle Stars, which are three very different planets that sit in a triangle formation in space. To find the treasure your crew needs you’ll need to explore them all, but for this preview I only visited the first.
Omega 6 The Triangle Stars is as traditional an adventure game as you could possibly imagine. In each area/screen of the game you have a selection of commands at the top of the screen that you can use to progress the story. These commands can be used to talk to locals, explore the scenery and move to different areas, all of which you’ll need to do if you want to complete your quest.
It’s not all casual exploring and chatting in Omega 6 The Triangle Stars though, which you’ll find out when exploring the ruins of Impostar. These ruins are hiding the goods you seek, but are also guarded by robots. Thankfully fighting is something Thunder and Kyla are good at, but the combat is a little unusual. Battles are fought using rock, paper, and scissors, with enemies losing some of their health bar when you beat them in this classic game. There is more strategy to this than you might expect though, as despite not knowing which attack an enemy will choose you are able to see how many rocks, papers or scissors they have left. It’s a fairly bizarre combat system, but one that definitely feels rather retro.
It won’t take you more than a few seconds of playing Omega 6 to realise how old fashioned this game is. The area of the screen you actually use to play the game is a 4:3 ratio square with static borders that fill in the excess area, which immediately sent me back to those CRT days. The gameplay is deliberately “older” feeling, too, which isn’t always ideal. The easiest way to explain this is my discussing how you talk to characters. Just pressing the Talk command won’t allow you to start a conversation with a nearby alien, before you start chatting you need to specifically call them over first. It’s a completely pointless extra step that slows down the game for no real reason, but it’s also exactly the sort of stuff you had to deal with in early adventure games.
I must admit I found many of the retro aspects of Omega 6 The Triangle Stars charming, but others frustrated me to no end. The text speed in particular is a good example of this. It takes so long to reveal itself, and given this is a game that involves more reading than anything else it’s just painful. In the options you can set the text to instantly fill in instead of scrolling, but this setting didn’t work for me (perhaps due to it being a preview build) and just meant I skipped half of conversations by accident. Hopefully this is something that can be fixed by patches before release, because otherwise it’ll be a slog to play more of this space adventure.
Omega 6 The Triangle Stars is a decidedly retro adventure, which although rather nostalgic might be a bit too old fashioned for its own good. The story is intriguing though – as is the bizarre rock, paper, scissors combat – and if some of the slower paced elements can be smoothed out a touch it’ll be a lovely throwback to adventures of old.
Omega 6 The Triangle Stars is coming to PC via Steam on February 28th.
