The last chapter of an adventure with your new friends. It’s just you, your team, and the final big boss that you have to defeat. Let’s all wish for a safe and bright future, and go kick some crabbing butt.
This is one of those games.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1677310 £16.75
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/in-stars-and-time £16.75
Itch.io: https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/in-stars-and-time $19.99
Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/In-Stars-and-Time-2463525.html £16.75
There is also a prologue prototype thingy-thing called Start Again: A Prologue for about 10 bucks.
So you’ve finally made it. You’ve explored Vaugarde, collected the 5 orbs, all without being frozen in time like the towns and people around you, and now you’re in the little town of Dormont, the morning before you storm the Dormont House of Change, and defeat the King, putting an end to his reign once and for all.
And you will defeat the king. The gods above deem it so, especially since every time you eat bricks, you wake up in the clearing in Dormont like nothing happens. Awoken once again by your party leader Mirabelle. What a wonderous ability, the ability to fix your mistakes, to keep your friends alive, and to gather information you didn’t know you needed. Naturally this ability is only a good thing, and you definitely won’t start to hate having it, nosiree.
I learned about this game through a relatively new video essayist, Auranym, in their video Hope, Loneliness, and Time Loops. Their tonal review of the game hits the nail on the head, so if you aren’t sold on the idea of “time loop game with knowledge stuff means avoid everything” then give it a watch. I really do enjoy this game and how it explores the aspects of a time loop that usually only get brushed upon in books and movies. While a certain other game (iykyk) really leans into the intrigue of exploring the system and using it to solve puzzles, Sif’s adventure here focuses on the emotional burden of watching as your world collapses into flat fascimile of the people around you, and the emotional toll that really takes.
I don’t know how to end this. I want to talk about ten thousand little details and things, but those are points that are best discovered on your own instead of spoiled, but I and so many of my friends intimitely feel the struggle that Sif is experiencing, so the story really does hit home. Perhaps his story may resonate with you too, or help you to understand your friends.
Oh also, this game is queer as fuck and it’s incredible. Siffrin and Bonnie are non-binary, one of the characters is aroace, and if Isabeau isn’t a fucking stellar trans-masc pun name from a French game, I don’t know what is.
Wait hold on I didn’t even do the normal “square is a square” review that I usually do, this game hit me that hard. Uhhhh, turn based RPG with active timer kinda like Chrono Trigger, except your moves and characters and enemies all come in one of three types, Rock, Paper, and Scissors, which interact exactly how you think they do. Your team’s level and skills reset on loop back, but if you talk to the save point, then when you loop forward, your team gets reset to their highest level at that point, and there are a few other things you can do to help ease this difference. Oh and if you use the same damage type 5 times in a row, you do a jackpot that heals your whole team, revives anyone that’s KO’d and unfreezes anyone that’s frozen in time.
Also occasionally the party’s kid will step in and in my experience miss, but sometimes they do hit the enemy so thats nice.
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