In Stars and Time was a game that I bought on a whim while it was on sale. I thought the premise was interesting and the art style was beautiful, so I decided to give it a shot thinking it wouldn’t take up more than 5 hours of my time. That whim turned out to be my new favorite game of the year, and a game I will come back to time and time again.
Premise
In Stars and Time starts like your stereotypical RPG, a ragtag group of travelers on a mission to defeat the evil king and save the country. With determination your group enters the castle… only to quickly die. Disheartened, the player restarts the game and gets ready to try again, only to find out your character remembers dying. The tragedy of it all is that your main character is the only one who does remember, running through the same fights and conversations over and over again. You and the character will drive yourselves mad trying to save those you grow attached to and figure out how exactly you ended up in a time loop in the first place. Explore the castle, get stuck, and die over and over and over again until you find all the information you need.
Gameplay
Time loop games aren’t necessarily my favorite, mainly because they can easily become annoyingly repetitive. This game put a lot of thought into making sure that wouldn’t be a problem here. Even if you are on loop 100, there always seems to be something new, from new dialogue options, new little quests, even new fun ways to die. Even if it’s a small thing that doesn’t have an actual impact on the plot, it makes the gaming experience 100x better in my opinion. The game is also broken into acts, so with every new act comes new goals, which also helps keep interest in the game alive. New goals means that rooms you have explored previously will have new dialogue and new things to discover, NPCs have new purpose and dialogue, and even new gameplay mechanics. They took the concept of time loops and experimented with it to its full potential.
Themes/Story
Now I don’t want to give anything away, but I want to give this game credit for the beautiful story it created here. This game tackles a lot of hard themes, all of which are forewarned when you boot up the game. Throughout these loops we learn to really care for these characters we are playing and interacting with, each who comes with their own aspirations and struggles. We get many intimate moments with our team, learning about them and learning about our character as well. A little quirk in the gameplay that I thought played well into getting to know our characters is the skip dialogue feature. Skipping dialogue is your character ‘zoning out’ from the conversation. Though when you first learn about this option, it warns you that while it won’t skip over important information, you will probably miss new, less important, dialogue by skipping. I thought this was clever, just like in real life, there are consequences to not paying attention when people are interacting with you. There are a ton of these little features that really bring the game, and its characters, to life.
Art Work (Slight Spoilers)
The last thing I wanted to touch on was the art style in this game. While a black and white theme isn’t necessarily revolutionary, the way that they use it in the gameplay and the action stills are charming and visually stunning. Though it is not just a cool artistic choice, there are some lore implications in it as well. Later in our adventure we stumble across some books about colors, meaning that the black and white world around us didn’t always appear that way. The characters will acknowledge these books and have knowledge of ‘the weird shades’ that existed long before. It is just one of those small things that really made this game so charming. Even without that I just wanted to give a little shout out to the arts team for this game cause they did a fantastic job, the game looks fantastic and is very detailed for the limits of the 2D RPG game style.
Final Thoughts
2024 has been the year of hidden gems for me and In Stars and Time is definitely one of them. From a lovable cast, detailed gameplay, and stunning visuals, this game has cemented itself into my all time favorites. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoyed games like Omori or Persona. This game is a project of the heart and it shows, the level of detail and care put in is what makes this game so unique compared to those like it. I have played this game for hours and already want to start again to uncover those little bits that I missed. This team has created something truly special and I am excited to see what they come out with next!
4.75/5
Check out In the Stars in Time on Steam and all major consoles!
Also check out our lastest review on The Quiet Place: Day One by Jason!