Cyberpunk mystery in a brutal world

Celestial Return is a wonderfully weird cyberpunk mystery set in a kind of dystopian world that makes the real world feel somewhat sad. Most of the game is happening by using text and dice rollsbut you get to see a hand-drawn background of visual cues that remind me of old comic books in their style.

A mix of Cyberpunk 2077, Disco Elysium, and Dungeons and Dragons makes Celestial Return a unique experience that may not play out the way you want it to. I know that my path didn’t turn out the way I had hoped, and the main reason for that was my bad luck with rolling the dice which resulted in most of my rolls failing, causing me to miss out on information or opportunities that would have been useful later on.

After reviewing Moonlight Peaks, a cozy game, Celestial Return gave me the opportunity to dive into a very dark world where it feels like alliances take the place of friendship because you can’t trust anyone, and everyone is too busy dealing with living in Netherveil to focus on anything other than survival. It is a game with a dark tone in a dystopian waywhich sounds like an interesting idea of ​​what the future could be like with a bad timeline.

As soon as you start the game, you hear music and sounds that will accompany you throughout the experience. Since Celestial Return is very text-based and for a few seconds you can control your character in the world, the artwork, music, and sounds should do most of the heavy lifting to immerse you in the game. I found these elements to be solid and not flexible enough to keep me immersed.

I believe the comic book style used for art is called pop art, but still, it feels like the right choice. It gives you the feeling of being the main character in a noir comedy series, and it keeps the world from feeling too dark. I also like the letter designs. The world of Celestial Return comes in designs, and you can begin to integrate the culture and lifestyle of Netherveil with them.

I did find a few mistakeswhich sometimes happens with early copies, so those problems don’t exist in the released version. The biggest problem I had was when we launched the game. I would have a black screen with a bright rectangle where the menu should be, and I wouldn’t be able to interact with anything. After force stopping the program and launching it again, it will start fine. It’s a small problem, but it was annoying, so I hope the core of that issue is fixed in the final release version.

Fell into Action

If you start Celestial Return, you are ready put in the middle of the action. I was confused, because the characters were talking about creatures that I obviously didn’t know yet, but that made me want to learn something about them. That didn’t last long, as you get a decent glimpse of the strange events going on in Netherveil that businesses are trying to hide as quickly as possible. I find this works better than saying the information directly, and is more memorable.

Unfortunately, my first encounter with Abstracts didn’t go the way I wanted, because I failed my dice. However, I decided to move on instead of starting over and trying again, because that felt a bit awkward when I first played the game I’m reviewing. This is the mechanic of Using luck as part of the story adds stakes to every meeting which you wouldn’t feel in a visual novel, since you have no guarantee that you can go forward with the option you chose. If it requires a die roll, you can fail and must try a different choice.

Mechanics Make You Careful

The way dice rolls work in Celestial Return is not the same as how they work in a game like Baldur’s Gate 3. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you always have at least one dice to roll, and you can add bonuses to that. However, Celestial Return turn the dice into money. You can increase your chances of success by using more dice, as it is up to you how many you can use up to the maximum level set by the game. The difficulty begins when you learn that the dice can only be used once. After you use the dice, they expire and end in your inventory.

As a result, you can’t just throw a large number of dice on every roll to try to pass them all, and yyou never know how many dice you might need later or if you will get more dice before you reach another roll. So now, you’re in this constant situation of asking how much you should risk with each roll, or if you’re better off going with the option that doesn’t require a roll and hoping for the best in terms of where the story goes with that. While I thought Celestial Return would be as straightforward and simple as a visual novel, the dice mechanic alone makes it difficult and stressful, but in a good way.

Celestial Return is a worthy successor to Disco Elysiumand will be of particular interest if you like Cyberpunk 2077 as well. I went into this game knowing he had a similar style, and I came out of it enjoying the whole experience. While not perfect, and I would have liked more places to explore in the city or more anatomy to walk around Netherveil, the overall experience of Celestial Return was an interesting ride through a dystopian landscape. I actually plan to play with it a few times to see if I can get some random encounters and if I can pass the rolls I failed the first time to figure out how that changes my path forward.