J.U.L.I.A.: Among the Stars

J.U.L.I.A.: Among the Stars
71
Metacritic
85
Steam
79.261
xDR
Our rating is calculated based on the reviews and popularity of the game.
Price
$19.99
Release date
12 September 2014
Developers
Publishers
Steam reviews score
Total
85 (783 votes)

J.U.L.I.A.: Among the Stars is an innovative narrative driven adventure game. The story centers on Rachel Manners, a 35 year old astrobiologist. She is a member of an elite group of scientists, chosen to embark on one of the most critical missions ever conceived on Earth. Now Rachel is alone, orbiting an unknown planet.

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J.U.L.I.A.: Among the Stars system requirements

Minimum:

  • OS: Vista
  • Processor: Dual Core 2 GHz or higher
  • Memory: 1 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Minimum resolution: 1280x720 with at least 128 MB VRAM accelerated card
  • DirectX: Version 10
  • Storage: 4 GB available space
  • Sound Card: DirectX compatible soundcard (Mandatory)
Updated
App type
Steam APP ID
257690
Platforms
Windows PC
Mac
Linux
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OfficeLady
OfficeLady

Most of the puzzles were a bit difficult, and I ended up having to read a walkthrough and watch youtube videos, but overall the story was very interesting! I loved the music and am sad that some of the music isn't on the OST they released with the remake. The music aided certain scenarios where I felt very alone and as if I were being watched. I definitely recommend this game if you want a bit of a mystery and suspense in a typical click and point exploration game with some slight horror-like elements. Would play again just for the ambiance :)

coldmist
coldmist

If you like slow adventure games - this one is great!

tcortese
tcortese

I mostly liked this one. A story that gradually unfolds, some puzzles along the way, you get to explore a few very different worlds in a solar system, maybe a little bit of silliness and "what should I do now?" moments, but still a mostly-enjoyable experience.

Skater7777
Skater7777

I would have probably enjoyed this game in the late 90s as a point and click adventure, but it was painful to play in the 21st century. I have nothing negative to say about the game design, the puzzles, the graphics, or the story, which all appear to be well done.

I love a good adventure game and many walking simulators, but this game is literally point and click for you to move. Not being able to walk around freely was the deal breaker for me.

I'mNotCrazy
I'mNotCrazy

I really enjoyed this game. Plenty of puzzles to solve and solutions to find and a nice storyline. Some nice environments to explore.

CindyK_JA
CindyK_JA

J.U.L.I.A. is a well crafted point-and-click space adventure. You play as Rachel - a member of a interplanetary expedition who awakes to find her entire team gone. Your mission is to work with J.U.L.I.A. (the ship's AI) to trace their activities and discover what factors led to their demise. This involves navigating to several planets, exploring various sites, and solving a variety of puzzles. You, Rachel, stay on the main ship, and all of your exploring is done through the 'eyes' of a Probe with a voice and a personality. At times you are interacting with the environments and at other times, you are using the ship's interface for navigation, analysis, etc.

The characters are quite likable, with excellent voice acting for both Rachel and J.U.L.I.A. The story is engaging with art and sound that fit perfectly to bring the various environments to life. The dialog is well written and does not overwhelm the player. For those who wish to speed read, you can click through instead of listening.

The game is puzzle heavy with a very diverse set of activities. These includes hacking, decryption, completing blue prints, some 'find and use,' and several mechanical puzzles. There are additional optional memory puzzles which test how well you've been paying attention to the narrative. None of the puzzles were difficult but the interface is often lacking in clear instruction. Thus, on a number of occasions, I found myself with no idea of what I was supposed to do or how the puzzle worked. There are a few puzzles that are solved by pure trial and error, with no apparent clues pointing you towards a solution. Thus, patience (or a peek at a walk-through) may be required.

There is an explicit save feature as well as 'auto-save on exit.' This is much appreciated by this gamer.

The game played smoothly for me with one exception. I hit a known bug that only happens to an occasional player. It was a showstopper and was somehow related to my graphics configuration. Kudos to the developer at CBE who stepped up to assist and moved my save file just past the issue so that I could continue playing without losing any progress.

All and all, I enjoyed time with J.U.L.I.A. and recommend this to those who love exploratory puzzlers with a solid story and characters. When you finish the game and watch the credits, it is pretty amazing to realize that this game was basically designed and developed by two guys, with a little help from their friends! Another advantage of watching the game credits is that you get to listen to a track of music that I thought was very cool.

ShinOnna
ShinOnna

I just completed the game for the first time - so many years after the publication date; I am glad I got to play it!

I have about 200 point-and-click adventure games with and without puzzles. I have a lot of flukes in the list, as well as many classics. One thing I don't get is how come J.U.L.I.A. didn't get into the top 10 of the sci-fi genre in AT LEAST adventure games!

Here's a summary of what I discovered in the game:

Story:
The game's story is developed via multiple media such as notes, messages spread throughout pads on different stations, by analysing substances and items from the planets, talking to our bot and the mothership's A.I., communicating with alien life forms, as well as the memories of our protagonist (although these are scarce).

It's well-incorporated into the gameplay and doesn't feel like you're just eternally reading pieces of content. This game is definitely NOT an interactive movie or book.

Puzzles:
Before starting my own playthrough, I did read that some of the puzzles were not well-made. I beg to differ: every puzzle had a lot of sense, was logical and adequate. Even the repetitive items (which I usually really hate) were spot-on because it was inserted in the story. There's nothing illogical about performing the same action in order to achieve a similar end.

I had little to no problem solving the puzzles; they had the right difficulty. Once I got the overall idea behind each puzzle type, I could solve them within a reasonable time.

Music, sounds, environment and voiceovers:
The music in J.U.L.I.A. is well-suited to the overall style. I think they put so much effort into the audio that they put a lot of other similarly-dated titles to shame. The voiceover was something I definitely didn't expect from this game. Considering the price tag and the year it was originally published, I was surprised to have fully animated avatars with excellent voiceovers. I am really pleased - everyone was annoying when they were meant to be, and pleasing to listen to whenever they were supposed to be so.

Animations, optimisation, controls, glitches, bugs:
I had zero issues playing and streaming the game. I got no bugs, no game-breaking problems, no annoying glitches. After reading previous reviews, I am pleased to say that it seems like the makers have fixed all that had been an issue during the first years after the release.

Negative sides:
I can honestly say I cannot think of anything negative to say about this game. I really enjoyed it - totally my cup of tea. It's like the more interactive, better-paced big sister of Tacoma. Loved it.

Xanasar
Xanasar

Engaging story until you get to the end and realize that it didn't make sense. Most of the puzzles are pretty good though.

RAD
RAD

Good game. The quizzes and riddles are not too hard to figure out, but still give you a nice challenge. This is a nice premium point and click game with a lot of unique Quizz and not so muck repetitive task as I first was afraid of just looking at het poster images...
Good story, sound, graphics and gameplay. A lot of the actions are read or played for you so you don't need to read everything. Thought, you need to read some of the story to solve the riddles...

Birdi Nums Nums
Birdi Nums Nums

Enjoyable story line , interesting and fun to play

Nix
Nix

This is a fascinating game. You might need to google some help for a handful of the puzzles; the game designers did a great job making things look inhuman/alien. All in all a good way to spend a few evenings. 10/10, did enjoy.

Stormtrooper
Stormtrooper

Got stuck in second task, UI is filled with stuff that does nothing and by the time you're done with watching the "setup" for the game you won't be able to return it.

Lady Michi
Lady Michi

This game is very challenging, more difficult than it looks like, but the story is designed so well, that the frustration stays aside.

FranckenMeany
FranckenMeany

My favorite part was when I first saw that thing, but I thought it was one of the other things, but it wasn't, it was just one of the things. I can't remember what they call those things. I really liked the entire game though, not just those things. i hope this helps you decide to get this.

once sniper
once sniper

Exploration story with puzzles. Some are really simple while others more challenging

astronuno
astronuno

Amazing game! The story is well constructed, the puzzles are challenging (some more than others), the art is just wow, the music matches with the scenery as the game goes, and a great voice acting! Definitely a game to keep!

DragonElderX9
DragonElderX9

What a wonderful sci-fi adventure! The writing and voice acting are on point. The UI and puzzles are varied and flow well. The art and sound, while nothing fancy, fit perfectly. I really hope to see more from these developers!

Slon
Slon

good game and interesting story.

Risingson
Risingson

There are very few games like J.U.L.I.A., an adventure which reminded me of the geeky 90s adventure games from Legend (Mission Critical, Gateway 1 and 2) and some other "aliens love maths" ones like The Ward or RAMA, with just a bit of Journeyman Project and planet exploration that brings back to Starflight or Star Control 2 (or ok Mass Effect). It stays mostly on casual levels of puzzles, with a couple of spikes, but what it narrates is always intriguing. One of the narrative games I have enjoyed the most.

GarbageWitchy
GarbageWitchy

There's so many many terribly boring minigames in this, its kind of awful. There's a letter guessing game, puzzle blueprints, picture sorting ones, ugggh.

And the writing is kind of badly researched? Like the first expedition team you find all died from radiation poisoning but no one bothered to test for that until several months in, another expedition got blown up by the highly explosive gas, radiation, etc. It's pretty not great.

aleks144
aleks144

Great adventure, exploration, puzzle and spiritual story telling game. I would say it's a little more then just a game.
Small con are some puzzles need walkthrough.

Løvert
Løvert

Easy to progress, mostly good puzzles.

TheDeluxeTux
TheDeluxeTux

In J.U.L.I.A.: Among The Stars, we play as Rachel, a cryofrozen astronaut biologist who awakens from her slumber in a strange solar system, decades late, to find that the rest of her crewmates are missing and that her high-tech spaceship is in dire condition. Julia, the shipboard AI, has also conveniently developed a case of amnesia due to damaged memory banks, and has no helpful theories as to what is going on.

After Rachel gets her ship fixed up, she sets about trying to figure out what happened to the other scientists on her mission, who apparently intentionally left Rachel in her frozen state as they set up ill-fated research stations and went on doomed expeditions to the various nearby planets. Rachel, through the eyes of a state-of-the-art exploration drone, hops from planet-to-to-planet, visiting the decaying ruins filled with the long-dead remains of her former coworkers to solve the mystery - from frozen moons to dense jungle planets to dry desert wastelands.

Gameplay is first-person point-and-click somewhat similar to Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock. The game has a slick interface, easy to navigate, and while the scenes are more or less static there's lots of fully-rendered 3D animations peppering the game, as well as full voice acting, to add some motion and color. The game's puzzles are varied; there are some minigame-style mechanical puzzles, some light inventory puzzles, and one or two timing puzzles, and some ciphers. My favorite puzzles were the locations designed around password-locked emails and electronic diaries in which the player has to use available information to hack a series of terminals and accounts. Some of the game's most challenging moments were the "mind map" puzzles, requiring the player to reconstruct the game's story in chronological order using a large series of sentence fragments.

The story in J.U.L.I.A: Among the Stars is pretty interesting and definitely made the main game's ~8-10 hour playtime fly by in a breeze. Admittedly, it does get a little weird towards the end, and the game's two available endings are fine, but both kind of downers. Furthermore, when I went back after the fact and tried to piece things together I think there are a few strange plot holes that I don't think are fully explained, though I may have missed something.

If you decide to pick up this game, and you are the puzzling sort, you should probably spend the extra couple of bucks to pick up the Untold DLC (frequently on sale for about $1.50 USD). This launches as a separate game which should be played after the game's main story, a pure puzzle game consisting of about fifty of the "blueprint"-type puzzles from the main game, as well as additional story which explains bits of the mystery that were left ambiguous in the main game. This DLC is also required for ten of the game's forty Steam achievements. As an added bonus, it also includes a soundtrack and hintbook.

2Feet2Small
2Feet2Small

Loved the whole concept of the game, the setting and the story but felt it was let down by really bad/cheesy dialog's you can tell the english language is not the creators first language or they have a really bad translator.

just felt cringy

but other than that i really enjoyed it.. wish there was more to the story i mean at the end you could pick what ending, how did the alien species know about about Rachel when it was MOBOT that done all the work? would of been nice of her to go down to the planets

Good game if you like cheesy scifi point and click adventures.

Neva
Neva

A thought out scifi story, with a female protagonist and plenty of puzzles to solve. For example code bruteforcing and circuit implementation. The game itself has help screens that nudge in the right direction, and there are enough online guides so that you can choose to solve the riddles yourself, or grab a hint every now and then.

Art conveys the needed scenes well, with an occasional animated cutscene here and there. The voice acting is worth listening. Plot has some influences from other scifi stories, but can well stand on it's own.

Another great crowdfunded game.

Just the Passenger
Just the Passenger

This game does a good job of creating a believable future and the challenges presented keep you going thru the story. This game with all the sounds and graphics really give you that immersion. The only downside is that the puzzles presented in the game seem to break that immersion they just flow well with the story line and you have to keep asking yourself why am i doing this. Luckily there are only a handful of puzzles or it would have ruined the game for me.

If your looking for a chill stream that doesn't stick to just one game check me out at https://www.twitch.tv/JustThePassenger !

MjrKuffenbach
MjrKuffenbach

I'm sucker for sci-fi mysteries and this one doesn't disappoint.

ScayTrase
ScayTrase

Просто но, со вкусом. Некоторые квесты конечно достаточно просты, чтобы решаться перебором, но при этом есть куча повторяющихся анимаций при ошибках, что начинает в какой-то момент подбешивать.
6\10
Полной своей цены я бы сказал что не стоит. По скидке на распродаже - можно взять скоротать вечерок

MW2K
MW2K

This was a good one, some nasty puzzles aside. A 70/100 effort.

The good

Intriguing story, with lots of twists and branches
Some excellent music
Well voice acted
Some very devilish puzzles
Excellent UI
Serviceable graphics and animations

The bad

A timed puzzle later in the game that's annoying
No prompts to do the Mind'o'Matics - you'll miss out unless you know it's there
Some parts of the story are a little vague

Taevas
Taevas

Decent little puzzler. Worth picking up in a sale.

Earl of Lemongrab
Earl of Lemongrab

This game is simply a joy to play for any kind of adventure or sci-fi fans.

Pros:
- beautiful environments
- you have your trusty robot companions to talk to, so you'll never be alone!
- the chemistry between the characters is great, a lot of dry humor that will make you chuckle
- and of course the story, this is what sci-fi is all about, you will explore the unknown and continue to want more!
- no more pixel hunting, the game has a feature to autodetect items you can interact with. It's optional but it's a great feature!

Cons:
- not much really, some puzzles require a bit of trial and error or memorization, but nothing that would be annoying

Count-Me-In
Count-Me-In

I so wanted to give this a thumbs up but, the fact that there are a couple of puzzles that make absolutely no sense in any sort of way of deduction from deep to the most simplistic reasoning makes me give it a thumbs down.
IF the developer had taken the opportunity to get a second opinion on how one explains what one is looking for-not meaning to give answers-but, to explain how the puzzle works because there are instructions that seem to come from someone who is out there in the stars themselves in other words, the instructions for a couple of these puzzles make no human sense and forget deducing, it is a guessing game at best. I am so glad I did not pay full amount for this and got it on sale.
After playing more I have realized that most of the game is enshrouded with ambiguous directions as to what one is supposed to be doing, there is no clear direction in the details, I was in hopes that it would eventually pan out since some of the puzzles are solvable but for the most part you end up having to look up wth someone has found out and then shake your head because you see why you didn't get this or that because, it was not clear and even after looking at the answers, still no way to tell just how the developer came to explain the puzzle the way they did, it needs a do over in the directions of what one is supposed to do, period.

Jal
Jal

J.U.L.I.A. Among the Stars is a point-and-click adventure, puzzle, and a bit of a mystery game where you take on the role of Rachel, an interstellar traveler that wakes up from a cryogenic sleep and discovers she is the lone survivor of an expedition team that perished decades earlier. Accompanied by her AI Julia and AI controlled mechanized robot she travels to various planets within the current star system to try and piece together what happened to her former expedition team.

Overall, I enjoyed the game; the puzzles weren't too difficult or too easy and the story had a bit of depth to it. There is a fair amount of voice work and its all done quite well. The graphics are pretty good; though the game is getting a little dated and playing in full-screen had quite a bit of screen tearing in the cut scenes. The point-and-click elements can be a bit annoying because the hot-spot indicator is an on-screen button that only reveals hot spots for just a few seconds -- you'll be spending an inordinate amount of time clicking on this thing; an iffy design decision at best. There is an end-game choice that can be made but unfortunately, I found both endings to be quite a bit less than satisfying. But all-in-all, J.U.L.I.A. was worth completing. $20 might be a little bit on the high side, though it's not a rip-off even if there really isn't any reason to play through more than once, save for achievements.

Jetfireundbo
Jetfireundbo

Sci-Fi Point and click Adventure in another solar system...
My dreams came true !

wardoson
wardoson

Came off cheesy at first but soon enough I was captivated exploring hotspots & reading logs. Generally a nice level + variety of puzzles (often more like mini games) with some annoying ones. Not the tightest of stories, but overall I thoroughly enjoyed this adventure with all its discovery.

REalm
REalm

Really nice. Needs some tweaking to work correctly on 4K screen, but that's minor issue.

Friendly Target
Friendly Target

Completet. Kept me intrigued. Got it on sale and would do so again.

[smp] movax
[smp] movax

Very impressive. Amount of work put by just two guys, into environments, models, cutscenes, puzzles, is crazy. The voice actors did really good job too.

Took me 8 hours to finish, and some stuff was a bit too hard / random (requiring a lot of trial and error without good logic behind them), some story elements was predictable from early on, but overall it is worth playing. So you get a variety of environment and classic puzzles, as well finding correlating objects and places, backtracking, traveling between places, to finish puzzles, and story puzzles, makes it rather hard to classify as one genre. I guess, it is somehow a bit like Myst. I only completed half of the achievements (the Mind-o-matic puzzles are just too trial and error, and would probably take me another 2 hours to finish).

Atmosphere is pretty good, and music is well designed too.

Technical: Works well on Linux, 64-bit native version. My only complain would be that there is no way to select resolution, play windowed, and some minor technical issues (hangs on exit), but nothing broken, just could be better.