Great art style, characters, and music. The story is pretty cool with a time loop...

However, it is still very much a ln RPG Maker game. I have spent 500+ hours in that program, so all of the defaults they used and the battle system just seemed so bleh to me. Like they have custom music but didn't go for custom sounds? It annoyed me a ton..

Maybe I'll play the sequel. We'll see.

i've written this review multiple times and each time I've somehow lost my writing... it has been a few months spent enamored with baldurs gate three and audio dramas, but let's try a third time!!

a very cute little game with unexpectedly emotional moments! i quickly came to love (and worry for) its unique and entertaining characters. plus it was all wonderfully queer! it was fun to vibe with.

seeing the slight differences in the loops also felt satisfying. the effectiveness of timeloop repetition surprised me - while at times it felt a bit boring or frustrating, it puts you directly into sif's experience... so i think it still did what it set out to do. it's a cool way to emulate lived experience and there's an understanding of mental health that i didn't anticipate. it was well worth the four hour playthrough.

i don't know if i will pick up the full game, however. the short playtime felt perfectly suited to its message and i think repeating dungeons and dialogue for much longer would eventually lose my attention. ...i do have adhd, though. others might really enjoy it!

For whatever reason I couldn't get the Mac build of this game to save, which accidentally ended up adding to the immersion.

Random technical problems aside (thank you RPGMaker, very cool), I love the concept of taking the mechanics of a generic, D&D-adjacent fantasy RPG game and using them to tell a time-loop story that digs into the cyclical nature of depression. The character writing and tiny worldbuilding tidbits are the real stars of this game, and do the heavy lifting in getting the player invested in trying to find a way out of the loops. There's a sense of a whole backstory that we're not clued in on as players, which adds to the storytelling about the main character forgetting details, hyper focusing on finding a way out. We become extremely familiar with the "correct" route through the castle, but the only extra details we get are the ones we choose to listen to. The genuine gut wrench I felt after getting the "true" ending speaks to the power of the tiny details in this game.

All of this makes me really excited for the full version coming out later this year, although I'm not sure how it will work in a full game format. However, if everything is as well-considered as it is here, then I have nothing to worry about.

Sweet, Short, and Charming. Lovable characters, a game mechanic done in interesting way, and a lovely art style. In terms of gameplay, it's pretty derivative of Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger in it's use of the ATB Battle system, but it shakes thing up with a Fire Emblem-esque weapon triangle. The gameplay can be confusing on first play but afterward it's pretty much just muscle memory.

Again lovely premise, soundtrack, visuals and more. Hopefully this game gets more coverage, and I cannot wait for the sequel. Give this one a go sometime.

Made me tear up at the end.

Any complaints I have about this game are basically just me being put in Sif's shoes so it's like Lol the narrative working as intended. At any rate even though I enjoy the concept it was very repetitive to keep skipping the same dialogue which I KNOW...! IT'S THE POINT. But it just got me a bit bored. Luckily it's not a long game so it's not that big of a deal.

The writing was slightly hit-or-miss for me and I wasn't into it at the beginning but it really got me engaged by the end. All of the characters are really unique and solid, their personalities are great and fun to read. The Researcher is goated btw.

Excited to get to In Stars And Time.

Time Loop games still work for me. Its a genre that's maybe been overused, but it works because the very act of a video game is a loop. Building information, gaining knowledge, determining your pathway. For that narrative to remain entertaining, the gameplay has to remain compelling enough to keep player retention.

I'm wary of Start Again expanding into a larger release, because the two hour "prologue" tells me so much already. There's a sense of a vast history we aren't privy to, a whole life to these characters that's locked off to us. They've finished their arcs and are off to fight the final boss. Sif's narration even notes this idea. "This is where the hero has their darkest moment and doubts themselves. You know that's what you're going through. But if you can't keep the smile on your face, that proves you're not supposed to be the Hero at all."

I think more than the time loop narrative, I'm interested in the recovery narrative it suggests. Sif is already broken by the loop, most memories outside this dungeon lost to time. What life waits for them if they can even escape this nightmare? How can they explain to their friends that the 30 minutes was a thousand years? Its that emotional complexity that pulls me in, that makes me willing to wait for the devs' full game.

As long as there's a good emotional core, these kinds of stories can still work. Making each moment of the loop mean something is where the spark comes in.

Yeah, we've done this before.

Spoilers below.

I think we, as a collective, need some time apart from time loops and multiverses. It's not them, it's us. We've been over-reliant on them the past few years. It doesn't need to be a permanent breakup, but we definitely need a break from one another. Much in the way that Everything, Everywhere, All At Once ought to be the temporary conclusion of Hollywood's fascination with multiverses, let's let Start Again be the temporary conclusion of indie gaming's fascination with time loops. We can revisit it in a few years if we really want to, but maybe it's best for both of us if we just leave things as they are for now.

Start Again is in a middling sort of mire. Next to a lot of its contemporaries, it stands head and shoulders above them; next to the best that the "emotional indie time loop game" subgenre has to offer, it's clearly lesser. The game is going to draw inevitable and unfavorable comparisons to Undertale, given the fact that both of those titles occupy a similar space. It shouldn't be much of a secret that, between the two, Undertale wins out. But, you know, both are still infinitely better than fucking Braid.

There's not a ton here to love. Gameplay is the most bog-standard RPG Maker fare, complete with a literal Roshambo "elemental" damage mechanic. Music is forgettable, character designs are all over the place, graphics are servicable. There are enemies that are clearly made to look like those cursed emojis that were going around a few years back, which should be as damning of a statement as you can make it sound in your head.

If you're looking for a hook, it'll be in the writing. Normally, these depression allegories tend to skew pretty personal to the author; beyond the broadest strokes of "I feel sad and like a burden", a lot of these stories are going to wind up only resonating if you can put yourself in the shoes of the person who wrote them, rather than the characters actually going through the narrative (provided there's a difference between the two anyway, and it isn't a piece of vent art). Start Again doesn't really suffer this common hurdle. The narrator and player character, Siffrin, has earned their misanthropic stripes. A Groundhog Day loop is still alien enough to us that we can grip onto the more universal feelings of helplessness and holding yourself together for someone else's sake without feeling lost in the greater plot.

Starting the game at the "end" works here, because the tiny world that these characters occupy feels storied. It gives off the feeling that you've started the game on someone else's save slot, which is genuinely kind of hard to pull off, and I should impress upon you that this is a solid writing feat. It would have been a bit cuter to have that play into the UI — having a file already made and ready to go on first boot, where you're made to select "continue" instead of "new game" — but what's here works well enough. You play, you lose, you try something different in the hopes of breaking the loop, repeat. Ludonarrative harmony, baby.

The entire True Ending sequence is saccharine enough to make your teeth curl. There's something about it that feels kind of...like it had to be there, I guess? Maybe I'm even more jaded and cynical than our protagonist, but having everyone grab your hands and tell you that they love you while they dump Therapy 101 motivational phrases on you barely connected with me. There's a moment right at the end where everyone is celebrating, and crying, and cheering about how they finally did it, and I had the distinct thought of "if this game has any balls, it'd loop me back to the start right now".

And it did.

Whatever score I was going to give this immediately shot up a full star the second the game decided to pull the rug out and go all the way back to the beginning after doing everything right. Twelve Minutes has a similar trick, but Twelve Minutes also sucks complete ass and has the gall to pull three more twists out of its hat after you've been through the first. Start Again ends just in time for you to realize that nothing is going to end. One final twist of the knife. Good shit.

Start Again really isn't all that impressive, and I wouldn't recommend anyone who's read this far to bother playing it if they haven't already. It's a short, mediocre title that manages to pull ahead on the final lap with a clever, brutal surprise. And that's where it should have stopped! Further investigation reveals that there's a much longer reimagining of the game called In Stars and Time set to release by the end of 2023, and it sounds like a terrible idea. There was barely enough meat left on the timeloop bone to get this out the door; shooting for a several-hours-long pseudo-sequel seems like tempting fate in the worst way.

If there's any cycle that needs to be broken, it's our insistence on remaking Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.

An undertale-esque rpg about being stuck in a time loop at the end of a quest. Speaking as someone who didn't like Undertale, but loved this, I appreciated the lack of the awful bullet hell combat, just mostly straightforward Turn based combat and an interesting setting that didn't take ages to get going.

I found the dialogue quite charming and funny, though I can see it not being to everyone's taste. And most importantly I felt something at the end of the "true ending" so I guess that's a recommendation from me.