Thinking about certain bits of In Stars And Time… I think glitch horror is hitting a point where people no longer feel the need to justify it or provide a metatextual explanation, and it's slowly becoming a purely symbolic art style, like white-on-black pencil sketches, etc.
One of the absolute most throwaway dialog lines that stuck with me from In Stars And Time is "All kids love rice." That's very true. As a kid I never regretted getting rice. Truly a grain that's a lifelong friend.
Siffrin from In Stars And Time becomes a guest character on Dicey Dungeons, but instead of dice, they use rock-paper-scissors symbols (worth 0, 5 and 2 respectively).
Playing this game is making me feel called out about how much my Twine game You Are SpamZapper 3.1 (https://fairysvoice.net/games/You_are_SpamZapper_3.1/) owes to the writing style of Start Again, seeing it writ large once more…
Suffice to say, if you liked that game of mine, this one is certainly for you.
A lot of otherwise innocuous stuff becomes especially meaningful as a result of the elements - in particular, the "your turn" skills, which let a character use another character's skills, provide a vital utility in accessing specific attack elements twice in a turn cycle.
The combat system is the exact same as Start Again, but I'll repeat the praise: the fact that the 3 "elements" are abstract enough to be attached to literally any attack gives the game a lot of flexibility for interesting combat decisions.
I'll give this game one hell of a credit: the sheer amount of minute but noticeable dialog and description variations whenever you do the same actions all over again are pretty effective motivation to keep doing the same actions all over again, as per the player-character.
This game takes a real damn handhold-y while to start getting to "the good stuff" relative to its predecessor, but… squeeze that orange hard enough and the acid will eventually drip out. I mean juice.
REALISE'S WITH A GROCER'S APOSTROPHE THAT THIS GAME WON'T BE POPULAR BECAUSE EVERYONE WILL SEE THE TITLE, DATE AND GENRE AND THINK IT'S SEA OF STARS
It's so funny to think about how this game basically asks "So you know the yellow star save points in *specifically* Deltarune… what if they were hot"
I think it's a little on-the-nose that these games' main character's name is Suffering, but it gets the point across. *someone tries to notify me and I immediately frisbee my phone into the nearest lake "for safekeeping"*
For those wondering, this is the feature-length "sequel" to Start Again (https://insertdisc5.itch.io/start-again-prologue/) which I was rather fond of a few years back. I highly recommend playing it first because the opening to this game DRAAAAAGS if you're not already somewhat invested in the characters.
https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/in-stars-and-time – It's 2023, baby. Wake up. It's time to play grayscale pixel-art melancholic character-driven death-based-time-loop top-down grid-based dungeon-crawler indie games that delight in making you do the same thing over and over