In Stars And Time Reviews

One of my all time favorite games now. From a storytelling perspective, the BEST game I have ever played. "oH buT ItS rEPiTitIvE!" It's supposed to be. It is not a bad thing and is handled really damn well imo. I cannot recommend it enough. insertdisc5, thank you for this masterpiece.

I was really engaged with this game and loved it's characters and then Act 4 happens... For an idea of what a messy specific grind it is, I was at Loop 16 when it started, and by the time I left it I was passed loop 100. You have to talk to specific people and read specific books in a specific way and it's just the definition of tedium. There's a character you meet that is suspicious but plot important and several of the books you read are gated at talking to them but the hints for reading those important books are basically that some are too complex, and another one you don't feel good and want to help your friends first. But it's not you friends you need to help, you have to talk to the suspicious person that definitely is not your friend considering the MC doesn't originally even think of their travel companions as friends an allies instead. And after talking to them the books are less complex to read somehow? This was just a gated event and unless you trigger all the erratically spread out things in a specific order here and there you make no progress and waste time. Sadly, I can't recommend this to folks. This is an amazing 7-10 hour game experience turned into a 25-35 hour slog. It really felt like the game was holding it's ending hostage by the end of Act 3 let alone going into Act 4, and by the time I left Act 4 and hit the end phase of the game? I decided I was just done all together. So that sweet catharsis and pay off for making it to the end will just have to wait, forever cause my desire to finish this game is dead and I'm burying it now. If steam had a better system than just yes/no binary thumb up or thumb down, this game would be more of a 7/8 than the overwhelmingly positive rating it has. Even for those less annoyed with it than me, there is a lot of grinding and the games progression flow through the loops should have been handled much better than it was here. TL:DR? The world is interesting, characters well written and the plot hook is great. The execution however does not respect your time and instead wastes it in droves with a frankly hostile to players second half of the game holding progress hostage.

Tumblr: The Game. Unless you're into Tumblr aesthetic the game's attempts at remaining interesting will fall flat. The characters are so quirky they're annoying. The moment you meet them they immediately tell you what they're about and every subsequent interaction ends up being exactly like the first. The strong dumb doofus remains the strong dumb doofus, the humorless adult remains the humorless adult, the easily excited defensive child remains the easily excited defensive child. None of the characters seem to have secondary focuses or any depths to their personalities. Half an hour into the game I could predict how pretty much any interaction between the gang would go and all of it so far was horrible. The attempts at humor are awful. The game encourages you to explore rooms and check every nook and cranny for items or fun interations. If you're not careful however, you'll stumble on a horrendously quirky sequence about the ethics of eating crab and how they apply broadly to culinary culture. It took me probably a minute of mashing "next" to get through that but it felt a lot longer than that. Even if you're careful and only explore the places where you can see something useful, the game will force itself on you with the loud = funny and quirky = funny approaches to humor. The moment before I quit I found myself getting annoyed at uncovering new dialogue because that meant I couldn't just skip through it. With respect to the game, this is clearly not how you're supposed to go through it, the dialogue, humor and character interactions are clearly supposed to be the meat of the game. This is because the only other thing to mention is the battle system. It is a bog standard jrpg battler, with an all-team special moves, kind of like in Omori. The battles are boring and formulaic and you end up mashing your way through them pretty quickly but such is the way of JRPGs. I kind of want to go back to the Tumblr thing because aside from the aesthetics and the writing the game also inherits certain points of discussion which unless you're really tuned into Tumblr/Reddit speak feel really out of place. To give an example, the player character early into the game meets what looks like an astral deity, who seems to both be out of this world, and to also know a great deal about the characters. How does our player characters uses this opportunity to speak to someone like that? Do they inquire into why this being consistently calls them "stardust"? Whether it's just a term of endearment of if there's meaning behind it? Does he wonder whether this being was waiting for them to meet and if so then for how long? Does time even make sense to a being like that? I do not remember our player character even wondering about any of that during their first meeting. Instead he used this opportunity to discuss the importance of preferred pronouns and ask the being for theirs. I wish I refunded this game but since I'm outside of the refund window I'll probably come back to it at some point to see if there's any depth to the story or the characters and whether my opinion changes in the end.

This game is so far in my playtime extremely enjoyable(and WOKE, saying that in a sarcastic way ofc) but the writing is pretty good so far I've even laughed at some of the cheesy puns the mc makes, it's also been a bit depressing but we'll see as the game goes, just from my first two hours I'd recommend this game(I haven't finished the game yet so I'll edit this review when I do)

I initially bought this game expecting a much shorter, much simpler experience, the usual indie RPG that doesn't do much out of the ordinary and whose main gimmick would be rushed and end up feeling disappointing, but I was pleasantly surprised that the game kept throwing new things at me when I figured I was finally done with it. If you don't want to be spoiled, this may be as far as you want to read. I'm not gonna completely spoil the ending but I will talk about some of the latter parts of the game freely, to address both the pros and cons of my overall experience. The game definitely has some rough edges, and I'll start with those since I still think the positives outweigh the negatives so I wanna get the latter out of the way first. How I usually approach games is trying to exhaust as much content as possible on my first playthrough, and I quickly figured out that if I wanted to find out new things that didn't progress the main story but did give me new tidbits of info or lore, I would need to revisit parts of the game multiple times. I get that that is the main mechanic of the game, and it would probably work for these situations of trying to go through as much content as possible if given more polish and an even more fine grained way of choosing what point to loop back to, but as it is, it does get somewhat repetitive to do things multiple times just to make sure you didn't miss something important. The times I felt like the game could get repetitive would go something like: loop back to the beginning of the third floor of the House, go through the motions of getting a key, getting another key, getting a key item, then (knowingly) unlocking a dead end path to get the characters to comment on something important, then looping back because I know I am in a dead end, grabbing all three items again, and finally now proceeding down the correct path. There are ways to skip ahead of these sections, but there are some optional scenes you will probably only discover if you don't do that and are instead willing to put up with exploring the House multiple times without skipping too much (for example, seeing the three visions of Siffrin around Act 3/4 which causes a special scene to play with your whole party. Only 8.2% of Steam players have the achievement for that, crazy for a scene that has some foreshadowing and hits hard too). Besides that, the lack of a satisfying closure for the status and memories of the country Siffrin comes from and what exactly happened was also disappointing. I get the idea behind wanting to leave some things up to interpretation or without a conclusive solution, but here I expected a bit more given how important the whole thing about their home country was to both Siffrin and the King himself. I would have at least liked a passing mention that a solution would probably be found for the memories of entire people's lives, their childhoods and all, suddenly disappearing and being left with nothing. With that out of the way, I still believe the game is really really good. The art is cutesy, and works well to make the characters be as expressive as they are. I think it is particularly effective that this cutesy artstyle will slowly mix in with the darker aspects of the story as one progresses, creating a contrast that shocks the player quite well into feeling how Siffrin feels. The way Siffrin slowly devolves with each loop feels pretty realistic too. Seeing this character you've grown to love and who was goofing off all the time at first start to break down and lose their will to do anything as time passes is heartbreaking. Siffrin is coded rather heavily as autistic, and his personality throughout the whole experience felt extremely relatable as an autistic person myself, both from his taciturn personality at first to a completely broken down shell by the end akin to burn out in real life. Great game all in all, definitely something I recommend if you enjoy a gripping story and are a fan of the "power of friendship" trope

I legitimately have no idea how to word this PLAY THIS GAME PLEASE! Amazing story, amazing artwork, unique ideas. This shit is GOLD and I am ASHAMED I didn't beat it earlier!

Played the game for an hour, want to sleep, came back to it later at like 10 and little did i know it was 6 in the morning and i had to go to work... 10/10 one of the best story games I've ever played, the ending had me bawling, the characters were really likable and I LOVE time manipulation type story's.

I loved every moment of this game. The world building is great, the story is powerful, the characters are crafted with detail and care. If you're looking for a piece of art that could really make you feel something. this game is a good pick.

I will forever miss my first playthrough of this game. I loved being able to grow alongside the main character and truly being able to feel how they felt, ESPECIALLY with how relevant that was to the story. I couldn't recommend it more.

This game changed my life. No joke. Im dead serious. No game has ever made me feel some sort of belonging like In Stars And Time has, and I hope it stays that way. I was one of the few lucky souls to go into this game blind with no thoughts and impressions, and its one of the best decisions I could've made. There's so many words I can't name to describe just how much this game saved my life, and how it allowed me to embrace the little things in life that I took for granted, such as friendship. In Stars And Time is genuinely a work of art and I want to say THANK YOU InsertDisc5 for creating a story that feels so genuine and real, as well as getting me absolutely attached to your fantastic characters! I fell in love with each and every one of them in a matter of a few hours into playing, they are all so relatable and unique in their own way and all feel genuine and represented well! I am obsessed with good storytelling RPG's such as Omori and Undertale/Deltarune but this game is dare I say BETTER and blew away ALL EXPECTATIONS. It's quite a treat start to finish and the price is well worth the overall experience so if you are also a youthful teenager like me and need a game to get hyperfixated on for weeks after playing I HIGHLY recommend picking this up and playing it to the fullest to get the best experience. Go in blind like me and have a crazy time. Trust me you won't regret it. Trust me you won't regret it. Trust me you won't regret it. :))