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Watch trailer on Steam ↗StarFear
Istari Studios · Published by Istari Studios
Last updated 9 Oct 2026
Fly. Die. Improve. Repeat. StarFear is a brutal space extraction roguelite where loss is learning, skill is the answer, and nothing feels better than getting out alive, alone or with your friends.
Action, Indie, RPG · More free games
Embark on a solo or multiplayer journey through StarFear's harsh space environment. Fly, die, and learn as you extract resources alone or with friends, mastering the art of survival one harrowing run at a time.
About this game
Your chosen gear goes in with you. It doesn't come back if you don't.
StarFear is a 1-4 player 2D space extraction roguelite built around two core ideas: quick reflexes and permanent loss. Venture into hostile zones, scavenge weapons and equipment, and fight your way to the extract. Die, and everything you brought is gone.
Take the best loadout for every run or hoard the fancy loot for later.
Fuel powers your run. Run empty and you're drifting.
Fly solo or bring your friends, then endure being asked to "go find my stuff."
Die. Learn why. Survive long enough to defeat the Kessari.
Gain experience to advance your pilot's level and raise the threat (NG+).
This Isn't Bullet Hell
It's a 2D space twitch shooter. Hard. Fast. Fair. Hard games make you feel something, and we want you to feel something.
Become the best version of your pilot self. Duck and dodge, time your defenses, and hit your shots. When you die — and you will — it'll be because of a decision you made. The combat asks you to improve, and when you do, you'll feel it.
Fly. Die. Repeat. Get better.
A Simple Reason to Fight
Your father's ship. A dead transmission. A sister gone missing. The Kessari are destroying your family — can you survive long enough to take your revenge?
Track down black market contacts, decode transmissions, and hunt the people responsible across escalating encounters that end in a final confrontation.
The Extraction Loop
Between missions, outfit your ship from a shared hub. Choose your weapons, configure your systems, stock up on fuel, and decide what's worth risking. Then drop into a hostile zone.
Enemies patrol with detection ranges and heat sensitivity — fire your engines near a patrol and they'll investigate. Push deeper for better loot. Complete objectives to advance the story. Extract successfully to keep everything. Fail, and it's all gone.
Escalating threat levels unlock harder zones, tougher enemies, and better loot.
Your Ship Is a System
Fuel powers everything — engines, weapons, shields. Run dry mid-run and you're floating in the black. Oxygen depletes with every crew member aboard. Take enough damage and your ship starts failing: thrust misaligns, weapons lose accuracy, fuel burns faster than it should.
Repair what you can. Replace what you can't. Push forward with failing systems if you have to or trade your cargo for speed and get out while you still can.
The Arsenal
Every run is a decision about what you're willing to lose. Rapid-fire machine guns, precision snipers, shotguns, explosives, devastating beam weapons that ramp damage over time, and force weapons that push enemies into walls.
Engines that trade speed for fuel efficiency. Shields that drain your tank faster than you'd like. Utility slots for dodges, blinks, tow cables, enhanced sensors, and more.
For more anxiety, mod your favorites and experience even greater pain of loss.
Fly Solo or Bring a Crew
StarFear plays as a tight solo experience. It's even more fun with friends.
Bring up to 3 players. Harass your enemies as a squadron of fighters, or crew a single vessel and split its systems between you. Your stash is shared — argue over which equipment to bring or sell when fuel reserves run low.
Divide responsibilities for the objectives at hand, then carefully coordinate or don't and apologize later.
Progression That Persists
Your perk tree and account level carry over between runs. Your gear does not. Spend perk points in a branching tree of 60+ perks across weapons, engines, and defense — with specialization gates that force meaningful choices.
Equipment power increases alongside new and harder enemies. Complete objectives to unlock new items in the hub store, open new zones, and advance the story. Save your game and return to it later.
Features
1-4 player online co-op
High clarity 2D geometric art style rooted in the lineage of Asteroids, Xpilot, and Geometry Wars
Extraction roguelite: extract to keep your loot, die and lose it
Risk/reward tradeoffs: choose what to leave at home in case you don't come back
Run economy: equipment and fuel are finite; each run ends when your fuel does
Shared hub for you and your crew to see each other's loadouts, practice, and compete in a speedrun gauntlet
AI enemies with detection ranges and heat sensitivity
System simulation streamlined for combat: fuel, oxygen, mass, and malfunctions
Multi-act story with handcrafted zones and increasingly difficult enemies
Wanted Level (NG+) for escalating risk and reward
Perks that grow your power the more you play
Save your run and come back later
DISCLAIMER:
StarFear is in active development and subject to massive, unexpected changes based on the game's vision and most importantly: your feedback. Some systems are in a more prototype state than others, but the skeleton is in place and the bones are good. We've been having fun and we're ready to share.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Dual-Core Intel / AMD
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 / AMD Radeon Vega 3
- Storage: 500 MB available space
Recommended
- OS: Windows 11
- Processor: Quad-Core Intel i3 / AMD Ryzen 3
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1030 / AMD RX 550
- Storage: 500 MB available space
Supported Languages
*languages with full audio support
Latest news
AnnouncementsOfficial
Second Playtest Live Now!
We're online!Now until September 30th.► REQUEST PLAYTEST ACCESS ◄ We'd love to see you on Discord, where we're posting internal progress updates regularly.RecapAt the end of our last playtest in May:The game was too hard.There isn't enough variety or incentive to keep coming back for another run.We needed to be better prepared to make significant balance changes partway into a playtest.What have we been up to?Our development focus has been:Difficulty, where we introduced difficulty tiers, a secure slot, and rebalanced the sandboxUser Interface, which has been largely replaced and greatly simplifiedProgression, where perks and unlocks have been decoupled and simplifiedAdditionally, there are quite a few other tweaks, refinements, and additions, such as:Missions overhaul -- now found in-raid and expanded beyond proof-of-conceptEnemy concentrations -- where you're rewarded for opting into more challengeHub rework -- with (still largely POC) interactable kiosks and simplified interfaceShip identity -- name your ship and feel suddenly more attached to each bucket of boltsWe also welcomed a new member to our development team, BlackBox, who has been hard at work expanding our item sandbox for more variety, particularly in the early game:Read full article on Community Announcements (Tol Eressea)AnnouncementsOfficial
Next Playtest: September
Hello there!We've been hard at work since May applying (hopefully) what we learned from our last playtest, and we're ready to invite more people in for round two:Our next playtest will run from August 31st to September 30th.► REQUEST PLAYTEST ACCESS ◄ RecapAt the end of our last playtest in May:The game was too hard.There isn't enough variety or incentive to keep coming back for another run.We needed to be better prepared to make significant balance changes partway into a playtest.What have we been up to?Our development focus has been:Difficulty, where we introduced difficulty tiers, a secure slot, and rebalanced the sandboxUser Interface, which has been largely replaced and greatly simplifiedProgression, where perks and unlocks have been decoupled and simplifiedAdditionally, there are quite a few other tweaks, refinements, and additions, such as:Missions overhaul -- now found in-raid and expanded beyond proof-of-conceptEnemy concentrations -- where you're rewarded for opting into more challengeHub rework -- with (still largely POC) interactable kiosks and simplified interfaceShip identity -- name your ship and feel suddenly more attached to each bucket of boltsWe also welcomed a new member to our development team, BlackBox, who has been hard at work expanding our item sandbox for more variety, particularly in the early game:We're going to let this playtest run a bit longer, to give us more time to respond and adjust while people are still playing. We're particularly interested to get some cooperative teams involved this time around, and with a longer run maybe you can find a weekend to get together with your friends!We'd love to see you on Discord, where we're posting internal progress updates regularly. Feedback is a gift, and the primary source for change has been real players who take the time to share. Bye for now,-tolRead full article on Community Announcements (Tol Eressea)AnnouncementsOfficial
First Playtest Conclusions
Thank you!First of all, thank you to everyone who participated!It is now clearer than ever how valuable crowdsourcing feedback and collecting analytics are to understanding what's working (or not). Up until the first Steam playtest, we'd only seen friends & family try the game out, so this was our first check against a real audience of regular players. We really appreciate everyone who took the time to take our game out for a spin.What did we learn?The game is too hard.Almost no players made it to the halfway point in a run.We have a "death spiral" problem, where you lose your best stuff and each attempt to recover gets harder than the one before it while you sit at a difficult your skill hasn't progressed to yet.We need to be better prepared to make significant balance changes partway into a playtest.There isn't enough variety or incentive to keep coming back for another run. We did have some returning players, which is incredible and very encouraging, but we need to provide more of a salve to the battered and defeated player.What's next?We're going to dive back into a dev cycle for a few months and try to address some of our concerns, the primary one being that too many players aren't getting to experience the whole game. We want it to be skillful and challenging, but it's clear that our control scheme is unorthodox enough that we need to make the learning curve a little less steep.Here are some high-level initiatives we're approaching first:Rework difficulty such that players can opt-in to an easier difficulty from the very start (think like casual vs. regular difficulty), with heightened difficulty options being available to unlock.We also want the difficulty to go more in the direction of gameplay differences over just having more and more enemies to fight at once.Add significantly more variety to the loot variety, particularly in the early game, such that runs start to feel more different from one another.Introduce a mechanism that allows you to roll some kind...Read full article on Community Announcements (Tol Eressea)Patch NotesOfficial
Early Game Balance Pass
We've been analyzing some of our analytics for first half of the playtest so far and it's clear we have a problem: No one is making it out of Act 1 (~Threat Levels 1-5):I like the direction of the difficulty trend line, but it's too many walls too early. Let's look at the culprits...Changes:Act 1TurretsDecrease HP from 60 -> 40 (2-shot kill with starter weapon now)Decrease rate of fire by 33% (1.5s -> 2s)Decrease projectile speed from 8 -> 7Decrease projectile damage from 35 -> 30SoldiersDecrease rate of fire by 16% (1.5s -> 1.75s)Decrease projectile speed from 9 -> 8Read full article on Community Announcements (Tol Eressea)AnnouncementsOfficial
Playtest Goes Live Tomorrow at 10am EDT
We're very excited to turn it on and see who (not counting our mother) turns out to play! Prizes At the start of the Playtest, we have three Steam leaderboards for you to compete in: Hub Gauntlet Best Time, a short race to help you practice piloting, but there are no rules in terms of what loadout you use to complete it! Best Run (Solo and Co-op separately), looking the pilot who finds victory on the hardest difficult with the shortest duration! The prize will be an invitation to help us design and name a new item for the game, e.g. a ship, weapon, or something akin to that. Highlights Akin to the leaderboard prizes, we're also inviting all players to take clips and screenshots from your play and submit them on our discord server! Our hope is to make a full trailer sometime in the future, and we'd love to compose it of moments from people other than our immediate family. Polishing Here's a look at all our changes in the last few weeks since the announcement in the hopes for the best playtest possible! New Ships Added 8 new ships, including a default 2-player option an 3 and 4-player options Co-op ships now always require crew to fire weapons The Gauntlet New timed combat course in the hub Steam leaderboards track best times Major Mods Update Added a second, more powerful tier of mods Added new mod types: cooldown, hull HP, mass, blast radius, projectile speed, multishot, and thrust Items now roll a random number of mod slots when they spawn Same-type mods can now be stacked on a single item Mod descriptions now list which items they can be applied to Increased mod drop rate from 3% to 4% Shields & Defense Added prototype directional shield Aegis Vane Balance Spectrum shields cost a bit more when you get hit Reduced Catalyst shield cooldown from 5 to 3 seconds Shotgun is now semi-automatic Increased Reacher projectile speed slightly Weakened Repulsor push at the edges of its range Refined Dendrite Vale enemy spawns Reduced starting fuel from 50k to 30k per player (3 ...Read full article on Community Announcements (Tol Eressea)
