Might be my favorite quirky indie RPGMaker game about depression. I'm going to have to mark this one with spoilers because I can't really effectively describe why it hit me so hard without at least getting into some of the details. It is what it is, I'll keep it to a minimum. Like, this one really did just tear me apart with the themes and story it wants to tell. That punch also hits like a truck thanks to the strong, interweaving nature of the game's mechanics, storytelling devices, and character writing.

The core conceit of everything that happens in this game is that the main character, Siffrin, exists within a concrete timeloop that relives the last days of what would be any typical RPG story. You have a party of companions you've traveled with to the final dungeon that houses the big bad guy. You even start parked in a town just before heading into all of that. It's just like Final Fantasy! It even has ATB! So after spending some bonding time with your friends, you hop into the dungeon. Clearing the dungeon is...not simple. And it turns out the simplicity of ATB within a single dungeon and limited enemy roster is not the most interesting thing. Navigation puzzles are also hard, and you can find yourself in impossible to solve situations. Past that, you may find enemies that are impossible to overcome. Everything sets into a grind of trying and retrying to find solutions to these problems.

And that's okay, because you've been blessed with the immortality of being able to rewind time as many times as you need with no real repercussions for doing so. Your party may lose some items and exp, but you know where everything is while Sif himself never loses exp so it's easy to farm back up. You're always just a loop away from solving all your problems. Just one more loop....wait how many loops have I done? 50? Oh dear. Things become tedious. The battle system gets worn out. The never ending chain of "climb through every room of this dungeon to find one silly item" quests drive me insane. It wears down on Sif. He says so almost in step with the way I feel about it. The moment I'm fed up, Sif is fed up enough to find a way to help alleviate it. He becomes stronger, faster, able to navigate past enemies and trivialize the game.

This creates a problem. The problem is, that the people you are traveling with, your long time companions you've done a whole adventure with, are just really great. The way characters are written feels so organic and natural, it's like I've known them for the entire adventure I wasn't even there for. Sif has, so it makes sense. The dialogue boxes make heavy use of different fonts, size, and special animations alongside expressive character portraits. You can't not get drawn into loving this group. The problem is, they don't remember anything when we loop. So every time we do this, there's a song and dance to go along with it. You spend time with them and have different, difficult conversations on the loops. Really use this to your advantage to get to know them, appreciate them, even love them as a family. This has a limit. Over the course of 100 loops, you can only hear the same lines so many times. You start to zone out, mechanically skipping conversations, until you spend almost every loop more or less ignoring them as much as possible. Once you've fully bonded and pulled the inner strength out of everybody, that's enough right?

Eventually, they stop being people and start being actors to a play you're learning to orchestrate perfectly. You begin to disassociate away from them, and start to gamify everything. It's a slow process that's built up alongside the ever mounting tediousness of looping. Eventually it's just natural, and that's okay because you're doing this to save everybody. The disassociation never goes away though. Things are lonely. The failures also hurt, and the party never remembers that pain. But you do, every time you think you are on the verge of success, only to fall short, is crushing. Sometimes you see things that are downright horrible. Only you can carry that pain, and you can't tell them. They won't understand, you don't have time for this, maybe they'll even think you're crazy and abandon you. It's getting too hard to keep this entire act up anyways, so the game allows you to start tearing down the mechanical walls even harder so you can loop more efficiently. Where's the harm in looping when I can one shot everything and trivialize the final boss into nothing? One more loop, one more answer, and everybody is saved.

Just when I feel like I can't take anymore, Siffrin breaks right along with me. It's really spectacular how this all comes about, and I'm not really wanting to spoil the final acts for the people who didn't heed the spoiler warning! However, I will mention a couple things! Things that exist as borderline gags in the early game turn into legitimate trauma that the player wants to actively avoid alongside Sif. We, the player and Sif, begin to have the same feelings about how much failure we are willing to take and what lengths we'll go to in order to minimize that impact. We start to turn to cruel and awful, cynical things to help. The game will try and talk us to down from these ledges at every turn, to try and keep some semblance of self on the way down, but I personally did make choices I regret. When there is finally some light at the end of the tunnel, I was legitimately scared to continue out of fear that it would get ripped away from me. As if on cue, Siffrin yells out "it's too scary, I won't do it!"

Writing around the specific ways in which mental health can be so isolating and why people in those positions may choose to go harmful things is just really hard to nail down. Marrying those feelings to game mechanics is an even harder task. In Stars and Time manages to cross that line in a way that felt just right with me, and brought some serious tears along with it. I never felt like the game was forcing harm onto me, in fact it was quite the opposite. Always trying to tell me to take care of myself and try to do my best, but acknowledging that some situations are just hard to get by. On a personal level as well, there was representation in this game I didn't know I needed written in a way I didn't know I needed. It was full of surprises like that, things I didn't know I needed until presented in this way, so thanks for that InsertDisc5.

Ultimately, In Stars and Time resolves itself in a way that challenges the ideas we have to be hurt to be seen both through gameplay and story. It does so at the end of what feels like a genuine battle with itself, never willing to relent on the situations it places Sif in while always willing to offer a hand to pull them back up. That marriage of play and exploration of emotion is at a high peak here that's extremely rare, so hats off to In Stars and Time for providing me with something special.