In Stars and Time Looped Me In, and Didn’t Let Go

ign.com:

I’ve written about a lot of games in this column in the last year, all of which I’ve loved very much. But I don’t think I’ve been totally obsessed with any of them in the way I’ve been obsessed with In Stars and Time. For a week, I stayed up late every night because I couldn’t put it down. I dreamed about it. I sat at my desk at work, watching the clock, eager for the hour when I could finally get home and try again to unravel the mystery of what was really going on in the hearts and heads of protagonist Siffrin and his companions.

In Stars and Time fits into a lovely mental box I have going of RPGs that riff on the Earthbound tradition by contrasting themes of earnestness and joy with an unsettling metanarrative that riffs on the very idea of something being a video game. Undertale is the best popular example of this, but I’d put games like Mother 3, Contact, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, and a number of others into the same category with it. If you like any of the stuff I just listed, buddy, you’ll DIG In Stars and Time.

But critically, In Stars and Time is radically unique in this genre I’ve made up, too. It’s a time loop game: we join the hero Siffrin at the very end of his adventure with his companions Mirabelle, Bonnie, Odile, and Isabeau. Together, they explore and rest in the final town before the final dungeon of their journey. Then, they use the five orbs they collected before the game even started to open the great House of Change, fight their way through its three monster-ridden floors to the very top, where a menacing figure known only as the King awaits them, having frozen much of the country in time for unknown (but surely sinister!) reasons. If it sounds like I’ve just described the entire plot of the final