Celestial Return

This is a great indie title, I'm keeping an eye on this studio. Honestly can't believe how much they've achieved as a small first time indie studio. Its not perfect, there's some issue but honestly for this price this is a great title with real ambition, style, incredible atmosphere supported by good mechanics with a few issues and a world I'd like to know more about. Pros - amazing sensory experience with the art and soundscape creating a vividly evocative immersive moments to moment feel that is truly immersive - interesting dice mechanics make for fun engagement and tension with decision, some issues too - great cyberpunk / cosmic horror vibe, wanting to learn more about the world - great music - great lore-rich world, plenty of mystery - solid textual narrative and choices, enjoyable feel of agency through the story to work on - dice mechanics as many have said can feel unbalanced, and hard to parse at times, interesting but also creates challenges to wrap everything up in dice - decisions on progress, flavour text, investigation and item purchase - characters - rose and Howard have a reasonable character piece together, but other characters could do with more developm…

I genuinely enjoyed the writing in this game. Unlike some other indie titles, such as Citizen Sleeper, which I enjoyed as well, it didn't feel forced. For me the strongest part of the game was that the character voices felt very natural. Some vignettes, especially the propaganda poster number one, the last pillar, and the conclusion of the Nikki story, felt a little bit awkward. For example, the journalist liked the way the protagonist deals with problems by inviting them to drink at a bar with him. She says, "Most people run from that noise inside." But isn't drinking with your problems at a bar or using substances a form of running from them? I absolutely loved how the game uses different media to create mood. All those short videos, sounds, dolls. Loved it. Thanks a lot for creating this art-house gem! I'm excited to play the game again. Please, keep creating!

I’ve seen a lot of comments on this game that were kind of negative or at least divisive. I kind of understand it: this is a "choose your own adventure" game with some resource management mechanics reminiscent of Citizen Sleeper, so the narrative has to be tight and deliver some punch. And in this sense, Celestial Return might seem lacking something—much like "Backbone," which endured similar criticism. The game starts strong with a very weird cyberpunk setting where paranormal entities exist and a spec ops unit deals with them. In your first "X-cops" mission, things go sour. Later, semi-retired, trouble finds your cyberpunk-noir character and an investigation unfolds. The first two chapters are very interesting, surreal, and puzzling. The third one is the one people seem to like less. But I would like to say that I disagree. The way we consume media nowadays (at least since "Lost" and internet forums of yore) is mediated by a lot of thoughts on poetics: how a story must develop itself, how the characters should act, whether it has verisimilitude or not. Thinking like that gives us Nolan’s Odyssey: plot-hole-free narratives, very soft around the edges, cerebral and well adjusted…

I love this game already and I'm excited to see how it'll improve and develop in the future! The soundtrack is remarkable, the art style unique and beautiful, and the characters are so far well rounded. [spoiler] And I really hope you'll explain the Mysterious Visitor some day. Come on... leaving some things hanging like that is just not fair. Mystery or not.[/spoiler] The only thing I'd want for this to be a better experience is a full voiceover like Disco Elysium - or a mod like Zero Parades has that turns the voices into the Disco Elysium ones.. maybe AI would enable to create a full voice track without breaking the budget too much. I've played the two mentioned games enough that my head almost plays voices when the internal aspects talk, but it'd be so much more immersive to actually hear them more often than just one cutscene. Other than that, the dice are not easy to manage and there are no means to get any other than coincidence. I think I'm now entering Elysium Tower with a total of three... wish me luck.

Solid Disco Elisium vibes!

A very nice experience ! I rarely do multiple runs and am often satisfied with the end I have the first time. But this game is short enough to push me to try to see everything. It's a small indie game so expect some bugs here and there but I didn't mind and autosave is never really far.