You all know I love my fair share of RPG Maker games. Reviewed quite a few of them by now, and I’ve showered each and every one of them with praise. OneShot, Omori, Lisa: The Painful, both of the Hylics games, OFF, Ib, the To The Moon saga, and the list goes on. I love these titles not because they’re my favorite games, but what they manage to do with an engine that, let's be real, has a lot of limitations. Less is more sometimes, and these games prove even in simplistic areas you’ll still find works of art. RPG Maker is great for those who want to get into developing games. I may even consider trying it out someday seeing how I nabbed RPG Maker XP for free a few weeks back. I’ve been running out of new RPG Maker titles to talk about, which is quite surprising seeing how many of them lie under the surface. No, I will not review the one about the two cannibal siblings. You'll never convince me, weird kid who's never ever been in a functional relationship before. Instead we’re gonna talk about a game I heard about late last year and it has been sitting in my backlog for a few weeks now.
In Stars and Time, another RPG Maker game developed by solo indie dev Adrienne Bazir, also known as insertdisc5, and was released late last year. What set In Stars and Time out for me is the premise being you are stuck in a time loop. Ah, time loop games, now there’s something that easily drags my attention. Time loop games much like RPG Maker games are not my favorite games either, but they are a genre of games that have been consistently good to me. You have The Forgotten City, The Sexy Brutale, and the masterpiece that is Outer Wilds. Okay, maybe one time loop game stands out as being one of the best indies I’ve played but I digress. Ever since I heard about the very existence of In Stars and Time last year I knew it was something I had to go check out at some point. Taking two things I like and combining them together? That sounds like a knockout at the park for me. In Stars and Time originally started out as a webcomic series for Bazir. The unnamed protagonist now called Siffrin would find themselves reliving the same day over and over, and with each passing loop their mental health would deteriorate. It was a nice concept with tons of potential, and Bazir created a quick RPG Maker prototype to see if a game with this sort of premise would work. It did and so they began working on a full-fledged game.
Making a time loop game is hard, because you have to consider multiple variables. How any of the knowledge obtained during loops would affect future runs. How player actions can change how each run plays out. In the case of Outer Wilds or The Sexy Brutale it’s making sure certain events play out at the right time, so you have to script them. Writing a good time loop narrative is equally as hard, because if the narrative isn’t good enough or make good use of the time loop aspect the player will lose focus and the game becomes repetitive. This and the limitations of the RPG Maker engine proposed a lot of problems for Bazir, but thankfully they stuck it out and the end results were beautiful for the most part. After such a lengthy development period the game came out in 2023, and In Stars and Time is now considered one of the best RPG Maker games of all time… I’m gonna time a lot throughout the review huh? It was received well with critics, sits with an overwhelmingly positive average on Steam at the moment, and it’s impressive to see it stick the landing. The praise for In Stars and Time is well deserved and I was excited to finally plow through it. How is the game after all the hype set up for me? It was great, for the most part.
In Stars and Time left a really good impression on me overall. I do think this is a great game! I recommend it and urge you not to skip out on it, but for everything it did really well it somehow managed to annoy me. Expect this to be a difficult recommendation of a great indie RPG, but the game must have been doing something right for me to stick around until the end credits. During the writing of this review I found a quote left by Bazir on a TechRadar article. “You know what, it is art, and art should be annoying sometimes.” - Bazir. As flawed as games can be, I'll always respect developers with a vision over developers making a game for a paycheck, because it’s by taking risks you create some of the most memorable experiences out there. Today we’re gonna be talking about why I love In Stars and Time and why it deserves your attention.
Story
We follow Siffrin, a young man traveling in a pack of five on a quest to save the world from the end of days. A powerful individual named The King has the ability to freeze people in time, and he has been rampaging across the land freezing anything that stands against him. He now resides in the House of Change, the place where team leader Mirabelle came from. Mirabelle was sent out on a journey to find 3 adventurers strong enough to help and so she recruited Siffrien, the strong fighter Isabeu, the researcher Odile, and a happy energetic child named Bonnie. Together they have gathered orbs to open up a gateway standing between them and entering the House of Change. The journey has been rough, but they’re near the end and soon they’ll all be able to go home. Siffrin doesn’t know what to make of all this, because compared to his teammates who all know what they want to do he doesn’t exactly. Still, he’s tired and can’t wait to achieve an ultimate victory with his allies. They have a sleepover, eat, go to bed, and wake up the next day to enter the House of Change.
The House has become distorted and is flooded with Sadnesses, the monsters created by the King to stop adventurers, but the entire team is highly leveled and prepared for anything. They enter a room which Mirabelle says is trapped, but when they look around they don’t find a contraption that allows them to disable the trap. Siffrin thinks Mirabelle is lying and tells the party nothing is wrong, but upon stepping far enough from the group he’s then crushed to death by a boulder. His life is now over, but he awakens in the same field he laid in earlier. He walks back to town and there he finds Mirabelle. She then asks him to find the rest of the group for the sleepover. The same thing she did yesterday. Siffrin locates the rest of the party where they repeat the same lines they said to him yesterday, and he quickly realizes he’s reliving the same day again. A voice then calls him over to the Favour Tree, a tree townsfolk go to wish, and there he meets a star headed fellow named Loop. The star-headed person explains what is happening to Siffrin, and that they have been sent from beyond to get them out of this mess. Maybe it has something to do with the King and his time bending powers. All Siffrin has to do is defeat the King and end his journey. Well that’s what they hoped at first. More is at play, and with each loop they learn more about what is going on. Repetition will settle in and with it comes madness churning in the mind.
Gameplay
In this game you’ll be reliving the same day over and over. Each day starts off with you waking up in the town of Dormot. You can chat with the locals, chat with your team members, and soon enough trigger the sleepover which then leads into the next day where you enter the House. The House of Change has three floors and each floor has a series of rooms and paths for you to go into. There’s sadness roaming about, and when a Sadness catches sight of you they’ll start to chase you until they run into you or you run away. When you run into them this will lead to an enemy encounter. It’s turn based seeing how this is an RPG Maker game, but In Stars and Time has a fun mechanic that sets most encounters apart. The rock, paper, scissors system. Everyone has a different damage type and enemies can be weak or resilient to these damage types. Hitting them with the damage type they are weak to deals critical damage, and hitting them with damage types they are not weak to will either lead to neutral damage or none at all. Your allies and you aren’t just limited to basic attacks. You also have special skills and buffs. Some of which allow you to pass your turn to allies or hit an enemy with a damage type that isn’t your base type. These skills have cooldowns, so be careful.
Another unique mechanic is the five in a row system where if you attack with a specific damage type five times in a row your party performs an ultimate attack. This deals colossal damage to every foe, and restores health to all party members even if they are knocked out. You want to do this as much as possible, because it can get tricky to heal several party members at once seeing how all skills have cooldowns and only one member, Mirabelle, has a healing ability at the start of the game. Beat an enemy, gain experience points, and level up. Occasionally get new skills which open up new combat options to utilize. Continue exploring the house, pick up equipment and consumables to use, and find keys to progress forward. Occasionally you will hit a roadblock that leaves you no other way of progressing. Maybe that’s wasting a one time use Star Crest on a path that leads to a deadend, not knowing an item you needed is in a room you can’t access now, or something else entirely. These occasions are when you want to loop back. You can start a new loop by interacting with Tears, or simply being killed.
Normally you can loop all the way back to Dormot. Day one of your expedition, and sometimes it can be helpful. Maybe you need a piece of information from the townsfolk to access something you couldn’t get to before, but other times you just need to access a previous floor. This is where Time Skirmishes come into play. By killing powerful foes you gain skirmishes and these can be spent to loop to specific points of the House, forward and backwards. You can even unlock all the doors on a floor to cut down time, but this will cost more skirmishes. Spend them wisely as you don’t know when you’ll run low and need them to loop to a point far away from where you are now. Find what you need, progress, and get closer to your goal. Not everything is what it seems. This game throws a lot of twists at you later on and even the first successful run will not be the end of the game. You need to figure out what caused the loop, why it’s only affecting you, and get out of it. Let’s just hope this won’t take an eternity...
Thoughts
There are a lot of reasons to love In Stars and Time. It’s one of the few only time loop games out there that use the idea of a time loop to convey a compelling message. It’s an RPG Maker game that aims to be an expressive work of art despite the limitations of the engine. The core principles of what makes a good game is here and for a majority of my 15-hour long playthrough I had a fun time with this game. As I said near the beginning of this review I did like this game and think it’s worth recommending but remember this is a difficult recommendation. The closest game I can compare In Stars and Time to is Omori. For every high point there is in this lovable package there’s a point in the game where you want to off yourself. Well maybe not to that extreme, but In Stars and Time found ways to frustrate. Not in the sense that the game was hard, but in a way where it wasn’t giving me good direction on how to progress what is a pretty big narrative focus. How is it as a game? Good, especially the opening hours.
Combat is well designed and has fun mechanics, floors aren’t too long and big enough to be overdrawn, and no encounter feels too hard. The game is hard and when you die you can understand how to prevent that the next time. Your party keeps unlocking better abilities and I like how the game tackles Siffrin’s experience. He technically is the same person each loop whereas your party members reset a bit. You get to carry over equipment and skills, but for team members you have to level them up again or equip them with a memory to remember a skill earlier on in a run.So you have to take this risk of do you want the perk that boosts their stats in other categories, or have a good skill sooner than later. Those first few hours of exploration and combat are great, but everytime it gets duller. Not just because of this game being a time loop title where you go through the same floors each time, but there’s not enough depth to make future runs accommodate your skill level. The best they do is throw stronger enemies at you early on, and even then they’re still really easy. Combat becomes a cakewalk, and what sucks to me is that you can’t flee from encounters. It’s not until late in the game you unlock a perk that can chase away enemies, but most of the time you can’t run past enemies. They’ll find a way to corner you and force you into what is a forced optional fight, which sucks and wastes your time. Performing that five in a row skill isn’t hard either and oftentimes can help you cheese fights, because you always heal close to maximum health and it cuts away huge chunks of health.
The game is going to get repetitive, but it’s by design. The story sees Siffrin get more frustrated with each loop. Wanting to escape more and more with each failed run. Everytime he gets closer to the answer his escape is dragged away. His friends feel more like robots than people as they repeat the same lines again and again. He always ends up collecting keys and running to rooms in a specific order. Fight foes who waste time. Solve problems that waste time. The game will constantly find ways to waste your time, frustrate you, and want it to end. I wanted it to end too when I struck hour ten of my playthrough, but then you get revelations. Answers to what could be going on, and then it’s back to work. This mindset of almost being there and not stopping till you achieve what you need. I don’t want to spoil too much of the narrative, but I will say the last few hours of the game will hit you right in the feels. The mental health of Siffrin deteriorates more and more, and by this point you get more depth to what is a character that lacks depth at the start. A person who doesn’t know what will happen when all of this is over and is afraid. A big central theme to this game is change, and being able to accept change and move on with your life. I think the game conveys this message thoroughly and ends with a beautiful end fight.
The game is a work of art, and that’s why it left a positive impression on me. That isn’t to excuse the other ways it found to piss me off. I enjoyed In Stars and Time when it’s telling its story, and gives you clear direction of what to possibly do. I do not like it when it wants to be an adventure game where you have to retread a whole castle just to find the one shelf or item you need to click on to get info needed to progress. It leads to needless padding, and it’s for these specific reasons the third and fourth act of the game feel overdrawn. One particular part of the game needed me to find three pieces of reading. These pieces of reading need to be interacted with in a specific order, but finding them is quite hard seeing how there’s a lot of reading lying around and they aren’t in order of floors. There are also times where you have to speak to Loop to get theories on what to do, and these can be vaguely hinted at times too. In fact, at one point I didn’t know what to do until I talked to an NPC who I had exposed all dialogue for. I got what I need and this lead to looking back on an hour I had wasted figuring sh*t out. I found myself then onwards having to look up walkthroughs while playing this game and trying to find comprehensible walkthroughs for obscure indie games is hard dear readers. On howlongtobeat.com it states the average runtime for In Stars and Time is twenty hours long. My playthrough lasted 15 hours thanks to guides, but it made me wonder how much time people spent trying to figure out how to do things.
In Stars and Time can be an amazing game, but it can also be an annoying one. Intentional yes, but you have to ask yourself if these annoying aspects to your game are always great. Survival horror games like Signalis and Darkwood have quirks, but it’s these quirks that get you to play more wisely and effectively. Soulslikes are pretty much the same thing in that you can’t just go and button mash your way to victory. You gotta manage your resources and know when to strike and when to evade. In Stars and Time has points that just boggle my mind, and it let me down at points. However, I still love it. The story, the message, the attempt to do a lot with a little, the art direction, and the characters. Our five main protagonists are the most likable RPG Maker characters you’ll see in a bit, and I enjoyed every second of them speaking. This game is more than just its central components and that is why I think it’s worth checking out. In the end I am going to give In Stars and Time a 9/10 for excellence at best.
This critique was written by the single man at Review on. Stay tuned for more content and feel free to check more reviews out over at my site!
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