Honkai: Star Rail shows the value of walking the same path twice

polygon.com:

In space and in anime, almost anything can happen. You will meet a girl named March 7th who wields a comically tall bow that fires glittering, bunny-shaped snowballs. Secret organizations will steal the memories of strangers and wrap them up in membranes that look like bubbles. You will step into the shoes of the Trailblazer, who’s not a person so much as a bodily receptacle of mysterious cosmic power that can bring disaster to entire planets. But even in the rush of its confusing early moments, Honkai: Star Rail presents a fractured sci-fi world that shimmers where it breaks.

Honkai: Star Rail marks another massive release from Hoyoverse, the studio behind the breakout hit Genshin Impactand Honkai Impact 3rd. Honkai: Star Rail is currently available to play on mobile devices and Windows PC (where I played it for this review), and will come to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 eventually. While fans of Genshin Impact and similar mobile games will recognize several of the systems in Star Rail, its designers take this game in a new direction by blending turn-based combat with more linear dungeon exploration, rather than giving players an open world.

You start off playing as the Trailblazer, a person who has had a cosmic power called a Stellaron inserted into their body by a mysterious woman named Kafka. After the insertion process, the Trailblazer forgets everything about their past, except for Kafka’s name. They wake up on a space station, where they meet Dan Heng and March 7th, two characters who travel from world to world aboard an interstellar train called the Astral Express.

As the Trailblazer, you help the two clear out an enemy threat of robots on the space station, and the leader of the Astral Express — a Greek