I finally finished playing In Stars And Time last night. I played the entire thing on stream: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
I posted some of my thoughts about it on t/suki, which are copied below:
I must say that I really had a lot of trouble with the game. I liked the beginning and end of the story, but the middle was really tedious and frustrating. Had it not been for the book club, I probably would have never finished the game. I believe this kind of tedium and frustration is an intentional experience, but in my opinion it dragged on for much, much longer than it needed to. I can’t help but compare it to watching Stalker, a film that also felt very tedious and boring — but at least the film was over in 2 hours and 40 minutes! It took me about 30 hours to finish playing In Stars And Time.
My frustration mainly came from the amount of backtracking and repetition I found myself doing. The game often wants you to travel from one place, only to ask you to go back and do it all over again. For example, floor three of the House of Dormont asks you to go to the right to get the smiling key, then to the left to get the angry key, then to the right to get the star crest, and then to the left to get the KeyKnife. And each time you go back and forth to get these items so you can clear the floor, you have to backtrack each way (except for after you get the KeyKnife, of course). Not only that, you only know for sure that this is the correct path after you’ve looped a sufficient amount of times. There are two dead ends that you can end up in after getting the star crest and you can’t simply load a previous save when you end up in one so you can try a different path right away, because Siffrin might notice something important that unlocks more progression later. So, you find yourself doing it all over again: To the right for the smiling key, to the left for the angry key, to the right…
And that’s just on a single floor; there are many of these backtracking-heavy fetch quests throughout the game. In ACT 4, you go forwards to ask the king about wish craft, then back to ask everyone what their wishes were, then forward to read what the head housemaiden wrote, then back to talk to Loop, then forward again to talk to the head housemaiden again.
Every single time you do any of these fetch quests, it’s so frustrating when, as a player, you’re prevented from progressing just because Siffrin doesn’t know what to do yet. You might want to read all of the books in the language of the country Siffrin is from, but you have to read each one in a very specific order because otherwise Siffrin just refuses to examine the evidence more carefully.
Since I felt like I didn’t really have any agency as a player (and remembering where any of the items wouldn’t didn’t really help much since there’s a specific order i have to interact with them that was unknown to me), during much of Act 3 and Act 4 I felt that my only choice was to play the entire loop from beginning to end while doing as much as I could, talking to every single person and examining every single item just in case there was new dialogue that would help progress the story more.
The pacing of the story is unfortunately affected by this too. I think the writing is actually quite good and I liked the end of the story. But I got the impression during ACT 3 that the writing was bad because there wasn’t really much to think about. I know that show, don’t tell is a common adage for writing that not everyone may agree with, but I felt that ACT 3 was full of telling and not showing… but the showing does happen later in ACT 5 and 6. It just takes basically forever to get there.
Okay, well, that’s probably enough criticism from me for now. There were a few moments that I really liked. In particular, I really related to Odile’s estranged relationship from her culture and it was nice to see how this aspect of her was commented on later in the game from Siffrin’s hurtful words (like for all the other characters). I also liked seeing what happened to the King in the end and Siffrin coming to the understanding of what they subconsciously wanted afterwards. I liked Loop’s conversation with Siffrin in ACT 6 (though I had to look this up because I did not fulfill the condition for it) and the implications of it. I wish there were more interesting moments like this because they were so good.