Backlog Bingo 2025: In Stars and Time

4/5, I think.

This game, of course, draws immediate comparisons to a few other major indie RPGs: Undertale and Omori, certainly, but also things like Super Lesbian Animal RPG (hereafter SLARPG if I type that again lol), or Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass (hereafter JATPM if I type that again). It's almost a trope at this point when one of these games has a bright and happy top coat of paint with an extremely violent or horrifying undercoat (JATPM takes place in the dream of a child dying of cancer, Undertale pulls its entire Alphys horror arc out fairly late, Omori...is Omori), and ISAT is certainly no different, so, if that's not your thing, there's honestly little for you here.

ISAT opens with the player character Siffryn (he/they; this game is the sort of openly queer where characters have pronouns on their status screens and, at one point, this is directly pointed out in a fourth-wall break) waking up from a nap. This is so in medias res that the entire adventure has basically happened by this point: you learn pretty quickly that the five of them have wandered around the world, gathering all of the macguffins that they need to confront an antagonist known only as The King, who has stopped time for much of the area for reasons that aren't at all clear to the party at this point. You're introduced to the traveling companions; Mirabelle, the obligatory Chosen One™ and paladin type (side note, I really love when the Chosen One™ is not the player character), largely responsible for healing and a couple of attacks; Isabeau, a loud and somewhat awkward brawler who I immediately pinned as "ah, the trans man" (this is revealed to be canon in subtle and less-subtle ways that I really like) who mostly buffs and debuffs but can also Just Punch Things; Odile, an old researcher (it's confirmed that she's much older than the rest of the party, but not by how much) from a country other than the one she's trying to save with the party, also The Mage™, pretty much entirely responsible for damage, and Bonnie, the obligatory kid, whose actions you can't control but who randomly buffs or attacks or heals based on vibes. The five of you hang out for the night, talk about the journey, and then venture forth to fight The King.

And then a couple of rooms into the palace, after some small combat tutorials, a boulder crushes Siffryn ("rocks fall everyone dies") and he wakes up from his nap the day before, but remembering his own death.

Oh, this is one of those time loop games, then.

ISAT, unsurprisingly, given the zeitgeist it's trying to be a part of, uses this framing to be Kinda A Lot: over the course of the game, Siffryn continually finds that the next thing that will definitely break the time loop doesn't, and begins to go slowly more and more insane and grow more and more desperate. It's difficult to write much more about that without getting into hard spoiler territory, but the writing is genuinely very good if you're here for earnest queer horror. At some point in the game's third act, you unlock the ability to do "friendquests", which are sidequests for each party member, helping them with their problems. The game's writing is at its most earnest here: Mirabelle needs help deciding who to date and ends up just...not, making her one of the only explicitly and textually ace characters I can name in an RPG; Odile dives deep into the ways in which she does and doesn't feel welcome in the country she's helping save, and how racism and cultural insularity have kept her feeling like an outsider even as she's gotten incredibly close to her companions and grown to love them, and so on through the rest of the cast. It's genuinely extremely heartfelt, and also makes an excellent backdrop for the other shoe to drop: as he's learned so much about them, and started to think of his companions as family, this makes Siffryn's descent into madness that much worse, because they never remember any of the bonding that they've done. It's genuinely very difficult watching things fall apart as much as they do, and I say this as someone for whom Omori didn't land at all.

ISAT uses this mechanically too, mooooostly very well? Because of the nature of the time loop, Siffryn is the only character who keeps experience, so by the end of the game he's significantly stronger than everyone else, making it hit extra hard mechanically once he starts being too traumatized to fight well. (Something something ludonarrative resonance something) It does, unfortunately, also mean that "just open a guide" is almost inevitable if you don't enjoy wasting your time: you'll often learn a bit of information shaped like "there's probably a book about this soooooomewhere~~~~~" and either need to poke every bookshelf in the game or just look it up. This is not my favorite bit of game design, but fortunately it's only at its worst in one act, before the game gets back on rails all the way to the endgame.

The combat itself is...fine, like, it's mechanically distilled about as far as it can, as the three elements are literally "rock", "paper", and "scissors", and they interact in the way that you already knew they did when you read that. Using five rocks, papers, or scissors..es in a row does a big screen-wide attack of that element, and (almost) every enemy shows you its own element by having its hands be a rock, paper, or scissors symbol. It's simple, but it ends up working, since buffs and debuffs aren't elemental and don't break a "five in a row" chain.

I liked this a lot, and I'm also still thinking about why it landed so much better for me than Omori did? Shrug! Something to reflect on further as I sit with the game more.