In Stars and Time Review in Four minutes - Endless Great 

In Stars and Time Review in Four minutes - Shooting for the stars
Here is my review of In Stars and Time in just four minutes. Every now and then, I catch myself playing a game and think this will mean an awful lot to an awful lot of people. Be it an expression of their identity, a way to compartmentalize and explain feelings, or just a clever enough way of reinventing what we already know, it just feels important. Stars and Time hit me with this feeling immediately and, tens of hours later, it has never stopped.
Time loop narratives are useful for exploring themes pervasive to the miasma of everyday life. Death, chaos, our determinable ability to long for what things looked like mere moments ago. It is a game both on the virtues of change but cautious of overshooting. An acknowledgment that growth is both inevitable in life and yet, paradoxically, the hardest part of it.
The story follows Siffrin, an adventurer with a band of friends who is just about to take on an evil king who has frozen most of their little region in time. When they are pitifully smushed by a trap on the very first floor, he wakes up the day before, doomed to repeat mistakes until he is free. However, he soon discovers his real mission isn't just to stop the evil king but something much, much grander. Here is where In Stars and Time manages to release genuine horror.
Combining the story beats of a Groundhog Day with the meta deconstructionist themes of this year's rather excellent Slay the Princess, it is a game that is divergent to the tropes of many time-loop narratives without a disdain for its influences. It is joyous and different without desperately trying to carve its own niche. It is unique purely because it is.
In pursuit of this, there's charm and humor dripping off almost every frame, with all party members having their own real personalities and grievances. Though you can make up for mistakes, the look of fear, anguish, and hatred in their eyes managed to make a real impact on me as I was playing.
The gameplay is that of a traditional RPG, with fights consisting of moves using rock paper scissors. Replacing the traditional elements used in games like Pokemon and Persona, this is a very simplistic approach immediately signaling that In Stars and Time is far more caught up on the moments between battles than the big fights themselves. Every loop has your team lose all their experiences and skills but Siffrin develops theirs alone. Fortunately, you can equip everyone on your team with memories of key moments: battles won, conversations had, and near-deaths. They will never remember the many loops but they will feel them in some way.
In the same way, In Stars and TIme, through the guise of our main character, actively berates you at points and rewards you at others. Siffrin doesn't remember much of their own past and is left mostly quite quiet, making it easy to insert yourself into his tiny little shoes. He is characterized further as you go and the game makes conscious decisions to split him from yourself but his pure sorrow is palpable in some of the game's most alienating moments.
I've spent quite a lot of time talking about the many aspects that In Stars and Time gets right but it is noticeably flawed in others. For instance, you are often given multiple choices throughout the game, that then require another loop if you get it wrong. This is a nice teaching moment but some more esoteric puzzle solves later in the game have you running through everything again for things you've missed. You also can't skip ahead by just clicking in the right space or researching the same bookshelf so you are sometimes, in a roundabout way, punished for guessing it right the first time.
There's an argument to be made that this is a meta way of making the player suffer a fraction of the boredom and frustration our main character suffers in each loop but It doesn't make for the best few hours of gameplay. It is clever and I admire the bravery of that decision but this doesn't mean it necessarily works and, when I was hit by a bug forcing me to lose a few hours of progress near the end of the game, this repetition became even more frustrating.
You can skip through dialogue you've already seen and it even manages to talk directly about your wish to do so. This relieves a little bit of this tedium but doesn't remove it entirely. You also get one special companion to guide you through some of those loops, rewarding you for discovering very minor differences.
Code was provided for critique purposes