Best Timeloop To Stay Up All Night Playing Award : In Stars And Time

Game : In Stars And Time
Developer : Adrienne Bazir (InsertDisc5)
Publisher : Armor Games
Platforms : Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, PS5
Release : 20/11/23

The best part of In Stars And Time is the quiet after each battle. Combat in the game is rudimentary - a literal Rock-Paper-Scissors system where you study your foes across phases to figure out what type they're weakest against. As our protagonist Siffrin gets stronger, the battles end faster, but always end the same way : the enemy turns to dust, the music stops and the screen goes black. He breathes in and out for as long as you care to stay on the screen and only then does the House of Change's music creep back in. Battle isn't glorious in ISAT - it's an ordeal you should be grateful is over, until it starts all over again.

You start the game where most RPGs come to a close, with your party of heroes on evil's doorstep. The King has taken over the House of Change outside of Dormont and is freezing the world in place bit by bit. By tomorrow even Dormont might be frozen in place, so it's a good thing Siffrin, Isabeau, Odile, Mirabelle and "the kid" Bonnie are there to stop him. This falls apart when Siffrin is crushed and killed by a boulder a few rooms in.

Instead of watching the world fall into ruin from under a rock, Siffrin is dragged back in time to the day they all arrived in Dormont with no-one else the wiser. You meet the celestial entity Loop who tells you that you've been ~~forced to~~ given the chance to repeat the events of the day over and over to save the day. Saving the game before this marked it as Act 1 and saving after this marked it as Act 2. "Aha", I thought, "This game has a classic three act structure : we set up the world in Act 1, explore it in Act 2 and wrap it up nicely in Act 3 in time for tea." How wrong I was.

One night I was feeling pretty stressed and decided it was a good time to sink into a little RPG take my mind off things. With the intention to see it through before I went to bed, I played past the prologue that the demo had spanned and learnt more and more about its world. Oh how I played. Loop and loop with diminishing returns and endlessly retrodden puzzles; it didn't take much for me to fully immerse myself in Siffrin's plight. Solving the same puzzles in the same ways when I didn't have enough Memories of Victory obtained in combat to loop to a completed version of a floor and Zoning Out of the same dialogue (a canonical skip feature that has Siffrin nodding politely through conversations), choosing the same prompts each time.

Outside the weak autumn light had faded to black but I kept playing, trying anything I could think of to break the cycle : intentionally going down dead ends, picking every fight I could and looping about ten times to figure out what Bonnie liked to eat to name a few capers. I also learned a lot about my party members and the wider cast of ISAT. My favourite character ended up being Mirabelle; one of the Housemaids living in the House of Change before King took it over and determined to wrest it back from him, she would be the main character in most RPGs. Siffrin was just along for the scenery.

By 4am I'd seen the end of Act 3 and was shattered to see Act 4 start. I was nowhere near over and Siffrin wasn't any closer to escaping the loop we were both in. Maybe if I tied up this one loose end it would all be over, but it was high time I went to bed. The next day I sunk into ISAT for another 10 hours and finally broke Siffrin free. I watched the credits and breathed in and out.

When you've been through something that you put 100% of yourself into for a little while, all you can do is feel grateful that the ordeal is over and wonder if you might have left some of yourself behind, still stuck in the loop.

This essay was originally written for my Twine game “2023 In Review”, which you can play here : https://citrusityy.itch.io/2023-in-revue. Thumbnail art by Game & Burger / .