Milky Way Prince – The Vampire Star is not a pleasant experience. The subject matter is heavy: expect a story of abuse, manipulation, trauma, self-harm and more, and expect it to leap into that story head-on. These things aren’t alluded to or discussed through the veil of metaphor; they aren’t themes. They are the entirety of the story, the entirety of the game. With that said, expect this review to talk about those things in some detail, too, so please be aware before you continue reading.
Naturally, the same heads-up is given before you start playing, but in many ways this is something that goes beyond a content warning. My immediate response to Milky Way Prince, after finishing it in a single grim sitting, was to wonder why this game exists – why anyone, in fact, even ought to play it. Even beyond its unpleasantness, Milky Way Prince’s depiction is aggressively literal. Plonked into first-person you experience all of this game directly, leaving something that, at your least generous, you could describe as a three-hour trauma simulator.
Why make that, and why play it? The easy answer is a moral one: video games ought to tackle difficult subjects like abuse or trauma, and the representation of them in media is a moral good in itself. That notion is a popular one but it is only half-true, and it’s clumsy. The wrong kind of depiction can do more harm than good. More than that, even the right kind is limited – representation for representation’s sake can confine a game to the role of courier, hand-delivering a message to you by way of normative, didactic parable. What would the message of Milky Way Prince be, in that case? Nothing any reasonable person doesn’t already know.
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