Celestial Return has many individually interesting elements that don’t fully come together, but may offer enough to satisfy players willing to wrestle with some technical issues.
The concepts of the setting in Celestial Return are great. A detective noir cosmic horror corporate dystopia where the horrors are more human than the corpos. Strange, untamed power appears and the first thing we try to do is weaponize and monetize.
You play as Howard, a former cop turned private detective who carries a rescued sentient clairvoyant rose in his coat pocket. You live and work in Netherveil, a strata of city built upon The Foundation. You can find old propaganda posters offering people a chance to wipe out debt and find a new life by helping to build Netherveil over The Foundation. A really fun side detail is that they’re getting ready to do it all again and build another tier of city overtop of Netherveil. The divide is wide and the promise of being able to cross it is a lie.
The game uses a simplified Disco Elysium style conversation system where many of your choices will be driven by one of five warring voices in your head. Virtue, Perception, Foolishness, Anger, and Intelligence. Perception, Anger, and Intelligence are basically what you’d assume. Virtue is the drive to do good. Foolishness is an interesting one. Sometimes it reads as goofy or stupid, but sometimes it’s more about keeping a sense of levity and some kind of spirit while at your wit’s end in a defeated world.
I found that many of the Perception and Intelligence options, if given the choice between them, felt like different rolls that would reach mostly the same outcome. Foolishness often annoyed others, but sometimes worked. Anger was a mix of being completely out of line and righteous indignation. There are times in the world you’re given that anger is the correct response. There was one particular dialogue where every other aspect is saying one thing, and Anger is saying the other. A very real little piece of writing.
The game’s dice system is probably the best realized gameplay feature. You spend dice to buy items, make bribes, or as consumables to complete skill and dialogue checks. Early on it makes you feel clever. Dice with negative modifiers spend just as well as the best dice in the game, so it feels like you’re getting away with something sneaky when you buy items with them and save your stronger dice for skill checks. You spend dice with a negative Anger mod on Perception checks instead. You get a huge cache of dice a couple times and almost convince yourself you have way more than you need.
Then you hit the last set piece. It cuts back and forth from planning to execution. Raising the narrative stakes while your dice supply dwindles. Even as you succeed in checks, it feels inevitable that you will run out before the end. I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the dice system and the possibility of soft locking if you run out, but I think it’s amazingly well done that you get tricked into thinking you’ve outsmarted the game before getting the rug pulled out from under you.
Celestial Return’s art style should be the big feather in its cap. The thing that the game is really remembered for. It desperately wants to be dripping with style. But, like many things here, I don’t think it’s consistent enough to work. Certain background elements are rough. We see a bookshelf in an office where the books look very incongruous. The designs of the Abstracts (paranormal creatures of vastly different visual presentation and power) are a high point. Some are more creative than others, but I liked the look of each in their own way.
Some of the human characters also have very striking designs that feed your perception of them. An avante-garde artist strikes a pose that shows you style, but also a level of self-importance. Cult members reject mechanical boosts and, in bloodily ripping them out of their bodies, demonstrate their dedication and broken minds. That’s what should be happening. The visual should feed the character. How we feel about them and what we know about them. But this is missing in many cases.
Many characters only get one portrait – understandable. But those that do receive multiple portraits don’t usually look like they’re portraying any different emotions. There is a scene where a prominent side character is crying. Her facial expression is completely unchanged, she’s just been given closed eyes and tears running down her face.
There is a level of cohesion between the written text, the art, and the story that is very badly missing in many places in Celestial Return. You meet a character who is described as being a mountain of a woman with a stained apron, a gap in her teeth, and stirring a boiling pot. The text telling you all of this is about five inches away from a character portrait that is mouth closed, no stains, and a totally still pot. Where is all the detail you just gave me?
One full-screen splash image shows two characters who should be in the absolute throws of despair based on what just happened in the narrative. And maybe there’s a really generous visual reading of them that gives that. But I think they look closer to mannequins. I think the artist is very good at designing characters and not very good at showing what they might be feeling. There are a couple of notable exceptions, but overall it kind of just feels like you’re looking at a default portrait with no emotion. For side characters this isn’t a big deal. But for the few characters that get multiple images, it’s very noticeable.
Content Warnings
Suicide, attempted suicide, body horror (loss of limb), descriptions of violence, therapeutic abuse
The main character, Howard, has many representations that do not work together. It doesn’t feel like you’re looking at the same guy. There are some changes that happen to Howard as the game progresses. I’m not counting those. I’m speaking specifically about the six different representations I counted of him before any narrative visual changes. I’ve included an image showing him sitting at a computer from two different angles, holding a gun, with his arms crossed, as the little red status icon, and as a sort of chess piece.
If you did not play this game, you would never look at these six representations and think “these are all the same guy.” As far as I can tell, the hat he’s wearing in the game piece model reflects an earlier design for the character that was removed between the demo and the full release.
Particularly early on, a lot of the dialogue felt very tryhard edgelord. Though I did find that to be somewhat frontloaded, so I almost think it works as a piece of the game’s progression. In my playthrough, Howard was finding renewed purpose as he learned more about the case at hand. So it could kind of be that the wallowing edgelord snapped out of it a bit. Possibly a coincidence, but I’m choosing to enjoy it. The dev team are not native english speakers, and I think this is reflected in some awkwardness in the text.
The game has a lot of issues in terms of how it runs and plays. Your save files aren’t sorted by runs, they can’t be named, and they can’t be reordered. If you want to try to make multiple saves at different points, it will be hard to keep track of them. There was also an issue where the save menu wouldn’t open at times, but that seems to have been fixed. The idea to include live action video at certain points could have been a real stylistic success, but they caused stuttering and crashing a lot.
A patch addressed this, but I was still having some issues. I also had an issue where a lot of times my cursor would flicker and disappear. It could still select choices, but I’d have to kind of hunt around the screen hoping I was pointing to the right thing. They’ve had five patches and a hotfix in one week since release.
Reading some of the pitch on their Kickstarter and looking at some of the older art they posted, particularly a piece where Howard looked like he could become some sort of cyber-samurai, I do commend them for paring down some elements of the game. They had a ton of ideas that they ended up cutting. Still a little out of scope, but I think it speaks to a creative potential to have realized they needed to focus a little tighter. They’ve also made a lot of balance changes to the dice economy. I think this is great, but also a mistake in execution.
I think a slightly more experienced team would have seen this as an opportunity to meet player demand by creating adjustable options. Instead, they’ve just made the game easier whether you want it or not. Personally I thought the original balance of very tough with a couple big boons to give you and the character just enough hope to keep going was perfect. You had to really thread the needle to get the “best” ending. You had to put in a lot of work just to get the opportunity to choose between “bad” endings. But I definitely commend the spirit of responsiveness.
They had already delayed the game to fix a big technical problem discovered last minute, so further delay would have been hard to choose. But I think this would have really benefitted from a couple more months of bug testing, another text edit, and a look at holistic cohesion. I hope Celestial Return is enough of a success that they get the opportunity to carry these lessons forward to another game.
Accessibility
The game has options for volume balance, resolution, and Streamer Mode (replaces licensed songs). Streamer Mode is a nice idea, but I don’t think any of these are particularly meaningful to a player looking for an inclusive option suite.
The gameplay itself is not timed and based only on reading text and some simple math in the dice sections. Players with challenges reading may have a hard time managing the amount of text in the game.
AI Disclosure
The game’s Kickstarter page has the following AI disclosure:
“Everything you see in the game and marketing material is drawn by real, human, and very talented artists and writers!”
There are some elements of the game which have similarities with AI generated content. The bookshelves mentioned earlier remind me of some gen AI images in that the books don’t appear to line up on the shelf in ways that make sense. The demo originally contained a background soldier with six fingers on one hand. When posted in a subreddit, the game’s artist claimed it was an art mistake. View the thread here and draw your own conclusion.
AI use is a sticky one, as it’s not possible to prove a negative. The score at the end of this article has not been lowered based on any AI concerns for two reasons.
First – I believe we will see more and more really high quality games that have used generative AI in some way as the technology continues to improve and more studios lean into it. Gen AI use certainly suggests a lack of patience, talent, vision, or whatever that will probably lower the quality of a game. But I think we have to evaluate the quality of a game and if we agree with the use of generative AI as two separate issues.
My aim is to give an honest assessment of what I believe to be the quality of a game in my experience. It is up to every individual to determine if they believe a game has used gen AI and if they will or will not purchase it based on that.
Second – I have gone back and forth on this one, but currently I am choosing to believe the developers. I believe the game was overscoped, leading to elements that lack cohesion and some details being overlooked.
Verdict
This game has been compared to Disco Elysium both pre and post launch. At first I thought this was just bad luck – being given too heavy a crown. Come to find out, they actually put it on the Kickstarter pitch themselves in the first place. I’m sure it helped generate interest and donations, but I don’t think it’s a favorable comparison when it comes time to actually play the game. I don’t believe there is a single element of Celestial Return that consistently meets the standard set forth in Disco Elysium.
Technically this is Metaphor’s second game, but it’s the first one of this scope. I would really like to try a second “big” game from them. Ongoing patches will continue to improve this one, but there are certain things that I find to be foundational issues that I just don’t see being fixable.
That said, there is a lot here. I’m a bit disappointed in how it comes together, but there are moments that really work. The setting is cool and has a lot of potential. They have a flair that could really work with some tweaking. I enjoyed my time with Celestial Return well enough, but ultimately I think Metaphor Games will boom or bust based on how their next project turns out.
Reviewed for Steam.
A key was provided for the purposes of this review.
Developer: Metaphor Games
Publisher: Shoreline Games
Pros
- The dice system offers a thematic way to engage with the world
- Only scratches the surface of a setting I would be interested in revisiting
- 4-5 hour runtime encourages replays in a way that longer games in the genre do not
- Invites the player to consider what it really means to be a human and what we do or do not owe to each other
- The “best” ending is hopeful, but (appropriately) not miraculous. If you miss the opportunity to pursue it, the game will breadcrumb hints you can use on your second playthrough
Cons
- Most individual elements do not coalesce
- Much of the early dialogue feels like it is trying too hard
- Technical problems will test your patience more than the challenges you face in the story
Review covers version 1.0.4
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Okay
