Timewell: Trail of Celestes

[h1]Introduction[/h1] Humanity’s last hope for a new home is an Artificial Intelligence constantly misled by cryptic alien messages. Nothing wrong with that at all. Or is it? I consider it a rocky start as far as Steam debuts go, but developer OZBER CIN has certainly poured heart and soul into this self-published project that has some nice ideas at its core, before it all gets unraveled by poor execution. I’ve never seen a more on-rails SciFi experience without actually being on-rails. It’s not Rambo: The Video Game in space, fear not. But perhaps it could have been a meme treasure trove under those circumstances. Not a saving grace in sight though. [h1]Story [/h1] The game’s intro sequence is pretty much the whole story condensed in a straightforward manner. By the 32nd century, Earth has finally had enough with humans and it tries a hard reset which I am actually predicting to occur far sooner than that. Two centuries from now, give or take. I’m probably too optimistic here. Anyway, we see a focus on South America and that’s a welcomed change from the more ubiquitous North America, courtesy of Hollyweird. Megacorporations have built an AI capable of deep space exploration, f…

Launched to early I tried the game and had to stop because portions of the dialogue sound like they are just copying the script. In addition using a Text to speech device for the main character is not a good look for a released game.

I can really tell the devs poured their souls into this game. From the mechanics to the combat and even the scenery. The scenery itself is what made me go "WOW!" this is pretty good! I really only have one major complaint in that the dialogue is a little loud and brings the game play to a grinding halt as you can't really progress until the characters stop talking. Other than that I liked the style of gameplay as it's 3rd person bullet hell-like combat reminded me a bit of NieR:Automata. Hope more people see this game and give it a shot!

This game has come as a relief for me after so many complex games with a high learning curve. Timewell, on the other hand plunges you into the narrative and game elements, then slowly takes you through everything. That mechanic alone made me fall in love with the design and the accomplishment feeling of the game.

Great game, played it few times at once, enjoyed it very much, real space adventure, keep playing

This game is like one of those shooters where you steer a ship from eagle eye perspective, just that it's 3rd person. You can't move up or down, just in 2 dimensions. I actually like such games, it's like 3rd person shooters but different because you're in an agile, fast craft. But. But this game has some issues. One is the pacing. Especially in the tutorial but later too, you just sit there waiting for the dialoge to finally progress, because there's no skip button. Even the voiced lines stay for 5 seconds or so longer after they finished being spoken. After completing one objective, it also takes several seconds for the next to appear. Not that the story you wait ages for was actually any good. It's a confusing mess. But, granted, that could also have been from me spacing out when waiting for the next line of dialogue to finally appear. I think I missed quite a bit in the end lol. A "story-driven RPG" as it says on the steam store page, this is absolutely not. A bigger issue is the enemies. They're too bullet spongy. Sure, so are you, but having to shoot at an enemy for what feels like a full minute is just awful. It feels like all you have is a water gun and while the "Dart" e…