[t/suki book club] In Stars And Time

In Stars And Time is an RPG developed by insertdisc5 in RPG Maker MV and published by Armor Games Studios in 2023. It’s based on a set of webcomics named START AGAIN by the author, which were written in 2017 to 2020[1] and it received honorable mentions for the Nuovo Award and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at IGF 2024[2].


Welcome to the first monthly t/suki book club thread for June 2024! This thread is for discussing the game’s themes, characters, plot, and style. Feel free to talk about what you liked and disliked! It goes without saying that this thread will be filled with spoilers.

You can buy the game on Steam and itch.io. If you want to experience the game for yourself first, stop reading this thread now and go get the game!

What game should we play and discuss next? Remember that you can pick as many as you want! The game that has the most votes will be the game for July 2024.

  • Before Your Eyes
  • Eastward
  • Emily is Away
  • Frog Detective 1 + 2 + 3
  • Hardspace: Shipbreaker
  • I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
  • Okami HD
  • Omori
  • Soda Drinker Pro
  • Spiritfarer
  • Undertale
0 voters

If you have any games you’d like to play in a future book club, let me know and I’ll include them in the poll of the next book club thread.


  1. Comics — Adrienne Bazir ↩︎

  2. https://igf.com/article/visai-games-venba-leads-finalists-2024-igf-awards ↩︎

You made a mistake allowing me to choose 11 options :raccoon:

You should probably limit it to 5

edit: yo wait… frog detective…

We’re doing approval voting, because I think it is better.

Source:

I apologize in advance, but I am gonna just go off, brain is whirring.

Emotions

For me personally, In Star And Time was absolutely brutal in an emotional way. There is always the dichotomy between being in control of a character and them doing their own thing, and in this game it was absolutely painful whenever Siffrin would go the destructive path, but it was also just devastatingly tragic. Because you know Sif is making these decisions after the mindnumbing and mindwarping tedium of having to repeat these events over and over and over and over… we get the privilege of fast-forwarding but for Frin it is all still happening and they are just trying to tune it out.

Themes

All the themes in the game were so well interconnected that it blew me away. This is the kind of writing that I want to be capable of someday and I know it is just a lot of editing and revising things to make them fall into place better but damn, it just was so cool. Change belief vs looping and frozen time. Sif being enamored with plays and then realizing they are basically in one and expecting characters to fulfill their roles.

Lore

The lore stuff around crafts and all the different disciplines. Isa and body craft. Sif and The King and whatever craft managed to erase their entire homeland, probably wish craft given how powerful it is and how Frin and The King both managed to use it and know the rituals to do so so it was likely a big part of their homeland. Time craft that is likely a result of wish craft as well and what other crafts might manifest from wish craft. Who is Loop really? Are they part of some greater pantheon of ultra powerful beings or are they a manifestation of the universe wanting to fix things or …?

Time

Honestly, it did sometimes feel like a slog, I knew I could die/freeze whenever I wanted to skip redoing the lower levels, but I was always scared of it being the final loop so I wanted to do all the best things to make sure my companions were happy and in a good place if and when the game ended. I got a taste of the kind of repetition that Sif would have to put up with constantly. But just like Frin, I wanted to push through it, I wanted to succeed, I wanted to free everyone. It was an oddly cathartic experience when the true ending was quite possibly one of the worst paths. I think the other characters were maybe too lenient, but it also just shows how willing and able they are to empathize with Sif. The game also touched on the fact that it was kind of a betrayal to use the power of time travel to do and say all the right things to game the other character’s feelings, and yeah… it is a real crazy kind of manipulation on such a fundamental level. I felt bad about it afterwards and it just led to me appreciating the ending even more.

TL;DR

All in all, I think it’s a wonderful game. The combat is not amazing, but I don’t really care about gameplay as much as story+characters+experience. It is a bit cheaty that the repetition/tedium is part of being in the headspace of the character, so I can totally understand how that could put people off. I loved all the character progressions and backstories/revelations and came away looking back on the experience very fondly and with new ideas kicking around in my brain.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk :bowing_man:

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I finally finished playing In Stars And Time last night! I played the entire thing on stream and here are all of the VODs: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Also, looks like there’s a tie in the poll, so I’m choosing Before Your Eyes as the next game for the book club. It’s 75% off on Steam right now until the 15th, so now is a good time to pick it up.


I must say that I really had a lot of trouble with the game. I liked the beginning and end of the story, but the middle was really tedious and frustrating. Had it not been for the book club, I probably would have never finished the game. I believe this kind of tedium and frustration is an intentional experience, but in my opinion it dragged on for much, much longer than it needed to. I can’t help but compare it to watching Stalker, a film that also felt very tedious and boring – but at least the film was over in 2 hours and 40 minutes! It took me about 30 hours to finish playing In Stars And Time.

My frustration mainly came from the amount of backtracking and repetition I found myself doing. The game often wants you to travel from one place, only to ask you to go back and do it all over again. For example, floor three of the House of Dormont asks you to go to the right to get the smiling key, then to the left to get the angry key, then to the right to get the star crest, and then to the left to get the KeyKnife. And each time you go back and forth to get these items so you can clear the floor, you have to backtrack each way (except for after you get the KeyKnife, of course). Not only that, you only know for sure that this is the correct path after you’ve looped a sufficient amount of times. There are two dead ends that you can end up in after getting the star crest and you can’t simply load a previous save when you end up in one so you can try a different path right away, because Siffrin might notice something important that unlocks more progression later. So, you find yourself doing it all over again: To the right for the smiling key, to the left for the angry key, to the right…

And that’s just on a single floor; there are many of these backtracking-heavy fetch quests throughout the game. In ACT 4, you go forwards to ask the king about wish craft, then back to ask everyone what their wishes were, then forward to read what the head housemaiden wrote, then back to talk to Loop, then forward again to talk to the head housemaiden again.

Every single time you do any of these fetch quests, it’s so frustrating when, as a player, you’re prevented from progressing just because Siffrin doesn’t know what to do yet. You might want to read all of the books in the language of the country Siffrin is from, but you have to read each one in a very specific order because otherwise Siffrin just refuses to examine the evidence more carefully.

Since I felt like I didn’t really have any agency as a player (and remembering where any of the items wouldn’t didn’t really help much since there’s a specific order i have to interact with them that was unknown to me), during much of Act 3 and Act 4 I felt that my only choice was to play the entire loop from beginning to end while doing as much as I could, talking to every single person and examining every single item just in case there was new dialogue that would help progress the story more.

The pacing of the story is unfortunately affected by this too. I think the writing is actually quite good and I liked the end of the story. But I got the impression during ACT 3 that the writing was bad because there wasn’t really much to think about. I know that show, don’t tell is a common adage for writing that not everyone may agree with, but I felt that ACT 3 was full of telling and not showing… but the showing does happen later in ACT 5 and 6. It just takes basically forever to get there.


Okay, well, that’s probably enough criticism from me for now. There were a few moments that I really liked. In particular, I really related to Odile’s estranged relationship from her culture and it was nice to see how this aspect of her was commented on later in the game from Siffrin’s hurtful words (like for all the other characters). I also liked seeing what happened to the King in the end and Siffrin coming to the understanding of what they subconsciously wanted afterwards. I liked Loop’s conversation with Siffrin in ACT 6 (though I had to look this up because I did not fulfill the condition for it) and the implications of it. I wish there were more interesting moments like this because they were so good.

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At first, I also tried to do the “best” for every loop but I eventually gave up near the end because I was getting pretty tired of the tedium and I didn’t want to do the entire loop from top to bottom again and again. Which, well, it is probably an example of the game getting the “right” emotional response out of me, but I felt that it didn’t land quite right. I think part of it was that I realized that I couldn’t do my best every time since in some loops I wanted to explore dead ends and I felt that continuing to play through the entire loop would have been a major waste of time for me.

I don’t think I agree that they forced their family to like them; I don’t think Sif was being manipulative given the circumstances. It’s only in ACT 5 when he ends up hurting everyone’s feelings that I feel Sif was actually being manipulative. Ironically, this is also when Sif stops believing that he’s forcing his family to love him.

Intent matters a lot with this kind of thing and before ACT 5, Siffrin is always doing it because he wants his family to be happy and because he wants to be loved. I think these are fine and normal things to desire. It’s only in ACT 5 when he starts seeing this interaction as a means to and end, and that is when it becomes manipulation. Instead of wanting his family to be happy and to be loved, he instead takes their love for granted and tries to speedrun each family interaction as quickly as possible so they learn the skills necessary so he can benefit from it. His family, in that moment in time, are no longer people to him – they’re tools. Apart from his ability to use them as tools to get to the King, he stops caring about how they feel. This, in my opinion, is when it becomes manipulation.

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I don’t think I agree that they forced their family to like them; I don’t think Sif was being manipulative given the circumstances. It’s only in ACT 5 when he ends up hurting everyone’s feelings that I feel Sif was actually being manipulative. Ironically, this is also when Sif stops believing that he’s forcing his family to love him.

I thought about it a lot while playing and yeah I get that the situation is not really within Sif’s control but their actions were… like if someone came into your life and swept you off your feet and they are doing and saying all the right things but then you find out they’ve been repeating every day to get a great outcome it’s kinda… wrong? The person you know isn’t the real person, it’s some kind of heavily edited and idealized projection of who they wanted to be. Intention does matter, but also Frin never came out and told them what was going on, it’s a pretty big thing to hide. It felt like a betrayal to me as I was playing. But also Sif’s personality and issues and the looping itself driving them mad are all things to consider too, and obviously the others did which was very thoughtful of them. And yeah, all my own opinion obviously :slight_smile:

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My frustration mainly came from the amount of backtracking and repetition I found myself doing. The game often wants you to travel from one place, only to ask you to go back and do it all over again. For example, floor three of the House of Dormont asks you to go to the right to get the smiling key, then to the left to get the angry key, then to the right to get the star crest, and then to the left to get the KeyKnife. And each time you go back and forth to get these items so you can clear the floor, you have to backtrack each way (except for after you get the KeyKnife, of course). Not only that, you only know for sure that this is the correct path after you’ve looped a sufficient amount of times. There are two dead ends that you can end up in after getting the star crest and you can’t simply load a previous save when you end up in one so you can try a different path right away, because Siffrin might notice something important that unlocks more progression later. So, you find yourself doing it all over again: To the right for the smiling key, to the left for the angry key, to the right…

In hindsight, I too could have abused the looping and floor clearing powers to avoid a lot of repetition, but in the moment it’s really hard to know if that will lead to a worse outcome or not… or if you’d miss anything by doing it. I can’t think of any way for the game to convey that it’s probably fine to do that without getting too meta/spoilery. It sounds like a tough game design problem to me.

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That’s a good point, Sif did present a heavily edited version of themselves and did not tell anyone what was going on. Loop was the one who had to tell the family in the end. Which was so frustrating!!! I spent a lot of time playing the game shouting silently for Sif (and to a lesser extent, the rest of his family) to finally open up and talk, and I was hoping to see that happen.

Of course, and I think Loop says this too, there wouldn’t be much of a story if Sif was more open with their family about their own feelings, so I suppose it’s fine hahaha.

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Hahaha, yeah, it would be a very different game!

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