Trapped In The Loop of ‘In Stars and Time’
For as long as I can remember, two types of stories have captivated me more reliably than almost any other: stories depicting queerness and stories featuring time travel. In Stars and Time, an indie title by insertdisc5, brings both of these beloved archetypal stories into sharp relief, offering one of the most distinct subversion of game narratives I’ve completed since the likes of Undertale and Doki Doki Literature Club. Trapped in a perpetual loop, In Stars and Time’s protagonist, Siffrin, is a character that is so relatable that I can’t help but see myself in their flawed logic, misguided emotions, and enormous (but selfish) heart’s desires.
In Stars and Time feels like your standard indie RPG from the outset, offering quirky mixed-energy dialogue that alternates between puns, ADHD ramblings, and intense introspective breakdowns. Nearing the final boss of Stars and Time’s world, your eccentric party members reassemble after Siffrin awakes from a disorienting nap, and host a charming slumber party. On the final day of their journey, they ascend the “House” of Dormont to kill the King – a character who has frozen an entire nation in time for his own misguided desires. To free this country from the King’s grasp, your party must ascend the many mazes and trials of the House and confront him, defeating the King for once and for all.
As a premise, In Stars and Time inherently cuts through the redundancy of massive RPGs like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Metaphor: ReFantazio – games that, no matter how much I love them, were absolute slogs in 2024 – games that, as I’ve written before, have no sense of brevity or respect for player time – games that are “too long.”
In Stars and Time needs not clutter your head with a thousand interchangeable weapon and armor pieces, scatter your sense of battle mechanics with job classes and retooled stats, nor does it foist unreasonable skill checks that gate your sense of flow and progression. In short, Stars and Time honors your time and intelligence, leading to a game that almost instantaneously communicates orientation, urgency, and a directional sense of accomplishment.
The true brilliance of In Stars and Time, however, is something that isn’t as instantaneous – and is something that the game’s layering mechanics of time loops and perpetually unfolding dialogue crumb-following accomplishes on their own. In total, my initial playthrough of Stars and Time took around 27 hours – I’d say that the game elevates itself from great to brilliant around hour 15. (I know, I know, another quintessential “wait until season five before the show gets good” recommendation.)
The fun of In Stars and Time doesn’t take more than 30 minutes to make itself apparent, however. From the addictive rock-paper-scissors traditional battle mechanics to the interwoven relationship between your party members, protagonist, and their time loop subtly changing your interactions, the early game of In Stars and Time is filled with ways to learn, experiment, and fall in love with the core cast of characters that will remain by your side until the very end. I’m not saying you will fall in love with each and every character up front, but by the end, I would challenge any player to suggest that they hadn’t nurtured a soft spot for everyone from the aloof Odile to recalcitrant Bonnie.
Time loop games, by their very nature, challenge the nature of authored, linear storytelling and character development. As an almost inevitable consequence, these stories dehumanize their core characters. In the case of In Stars and Time, Siffrin’s breakdown and alienation from the remaining members of their party feels like watching a block of ice melt under a hot water tap. You know that Siffrin’s intentions are whole and good, and that their friends – later renamed to “allies” and then “family members” over the course of the narrative – have the best of intentions. But even someone strong like Siffrin buckles under the weight of the existential burden placed upon him: he cannot go on, sanely, without a catharsis, one that eventually explodes and hurts the people he tries to protect most.
As I recently wrote, my favorite games are the ones that pull no punches – that stab me in the gut while looking me in the eye, demanding a “thank you.” In Stars and Time, cutesy indie though it is, left the knife in and kept twisting far longer than most games. As a result, In Stars and Time is one of my most beloved games in recent memory, and I want to discuss why.
Years ago, I encountered the idea that you don’t read fiction, fiction reads you. That principle has stuck with me throughout my career writing about games, too. The best games aren’t games you play, as I often refrain, they are the games that play you. To me, that’s the heart of why In Stars and Time was so emotionally impactful for me – not that it wouldn’t hit as hard otherwise, but I played it at perhaps the perfect time in my life, which primed me to resonate much more deeply with its themes and characters than I might have previously.
See, after finishing In Stars and Time, I felt like Siffrin, the protagonist – trapped in a loop, a loop I don’t fully understand. It’s a less metaphysical loop than Siffrin’s, to be sure, but it feels no less confining. Between the drudgery of my miserable job constituted by meaningless work, recent health problems that have altered my relationship to my body, and the repetitive cluster of existential threats that is the admixture of daily American politics – I feel like I haven’t been able to escape this repetitious cycle since I fled Florida in 2023.
When I left Florida, I told myself that I was escaping the hateful rhetoric and legislation that directly threatened trans and queer people; at a national scale now, that threat feels bigger than ever, constantly amplified by the Trump administration and its cronies. When I left Florida, I was under the impression that, in addition to taking a pay bump, I was going to work in a place that more closely aligned with my values; on a daily level now, I have never felt so disconnected from my line of work, the type that is supposed to give you daily meaning and communicate a contributive feeling of impact. And when I left Florida, I had just settled into my new life with healthcare – between blood pressure concerns, anxiety medication, newer hormone regimens, and a developing relationship with therapy; since then, my health has worsened, my HRT effects have seemingly plateaued, and my therapist was so abysmal that I reached the end of one full year with her before cutting it off. In short, the cycle of problems – the loop I thought I was escaping back home – dragged me right back in, despite my best intentions and efforts.
And worse still, as I played In Stars and Time, I saw myself in Siffrin – not just the loop they are trapped in – but the types of moral quandaries and failures that I, too experience, even though this story is largely based in fantasy.
When Siffrin takes matters into their own hands, trying to break the loop on their own, kicking their friends to the side in the process and saying incredibly hurtful things just to get them out of the way of his own self destructive tirade, that’s me.
When Siffrin explodes into a massive version of himself, unthinkingly ready to hurt and discard his friends for standing up to him at all because he thinks he has to control everything, that’s me.
When Siffrin grinds and over-levels and feels superior, like he doesn’t need anyone, even though they’ve all reset and never had the chance to keep up with him, and yet he disregards them and wallops people in their place, that’s me.
When Siffrin thinks judgmental things in his head, about his friends, who he calls his “family,” and holds people to unrealistic standards that are entirely self contrived, without remorse, that’s me.
The scary thing about In Stars and Time is that, even though I am most certainly not in a time loop, I have watched myself act out the same patterns, the same stories as Siffrin. He has the excuse of driving himself – or being driven – mad by the loop. I have no such excuse. I live my life under the delusion that if I just try harder, if I just give it one more go, if I just go back to Dormont and ask the librarian about the Favor Tree, I’ll find that missing piece, that hidden key, that secret library tucked behind the brick wall. But in life, every detour, every shortcut, every effort, is repaid with disenfranchisement. I can move states again, I can change careers, I can survive a breakup, I can alter my lifestyle – but all roads inevitably lead back here, or so it feels.
Desperately, I want a “Loop” – the trickster character from In Stars and Time that guides Siffrin forward in key moments. I want someone to guide me, in private, someone to whom I can ask all the questions and receive all the answers. Hell, I’ll take cryptic ones or even non-answers, because at least then I can give up the vain search for meaning – grasping at the shadow reflection of myself that disappears as soon as I acknowledge it.
But anyone who I could view as my own personal Loop, even if imperfect, is gone. Gone is the world of the adult life I prepared for, where I dedicated endless hours to philosophy and reason and argumentation and rhetoric to help make a difference in the world. Gone is the society of logic and truth and empathy, if it ever was truly there to begin with. Gone is the optimism for progressive social change, uplifting people different from us. This hostile world of isolation and unreason exhausts me to the point of insanity, like Siffrin trying to make sense of his existential looping situation. There is, in short, no one to guide us out of this corrupted mess, and I feel trapped within an increasingly despair-inducing future that I alone lack the power to prevent.
The delicate feeling of brokenness, the frayed edges on your soul, scattered to the wind like dandelion seeds, are delivered just when it all feels like too much. On the shreds of my remaining sanity, the King says something new; on the eve of my final (which is to say, one-hundredth) run, I spend time making memories with my friends, cementing them as lifelong bonds, not just companions; just when I, too, like Siffrin, lay there in disbelief as my perfectly confident and well-earned run to victory is shattered like a Prince Rupert’s Drop, I let the shards lay there for a few moments, embedded in me, because at least the pricks of pain and blood are new, at least that’s something – and something, even painful, is better than the hopelessness of nothing, the directionlessness of giving everything you had to a purpose, only to realize that your efforts weren’t enough. I let the shards scar me, I even play with the jagged edges lodged into my skin before deciding to pluck them out, because I don’t know how to move forward, so I might as well wallow in the nihilistic emptiness indefinitely. And as I finally get over myself, take a few labored breaths, stare longingly at the back of my eyelids wishing for it to be over, I get up, and Mirabelle is there. And I’m reminded that I have to keep going.
Being queer means encountering the world without the illusion of fitting in or being perfectly accepted, that’s why so many of us find our families. I find it beautiful that Siffrin’s friends soon, and indistinguishably for me, are referred to by the in-game text (not just dialogue) as “family members.” Because that’s exactly who they are. In the beginning of the game, Siffrin calls them friends – but Odile, being quite a bit older than the remaining group, objects lightheartedly, saying that makes her feel weird – so Siffrin changes it to “allies” – albeit a colder but more “acquaintance”-like title. After the friend’s many memories, it becomes “family.” You’ve survived together.
When the House obliterates itself in a chaotic maze of rearrangement, that’s how I feel inside all the time. I could return to the cliche, “in Trump’s America,” as a trans person, but I mean it in so many other ways, too. I miss being home, I miss my mom, I miss my friends, I miss my cats, I miss the weather and nature, I miss the ocean; where I live now, it’s fast paced, it’s hyper competitive, it’s expensive, it’s exhausting, it’s a morass of rules and regulations, it’s hyper policed, it’s engorged with traffic cameras and parking meters, it’s full of unruly teenagers; in my relationships, I can’t see my lifelong friends so I make due with phone calls and Instagram messages; with my (now ex) romantic partner, I still struggle with the nature of giving yourself to someone, choosing to love them on bad days, putting their needs above your own, taking care of them and loving them through bad times and bad decisions, and in this case, letting them leave because of how much they, too, can’t stand this city where I’ve sought refuge; with my job, I miss sanity and structure, I miss standards and expectations, I miss community and camaraderie, I miss leaving work feeling like I made an impact, I miss respect and admiration and feeling special, taking home the certainty that my efforts made impact.
With this political landscape, with my displacement from my hometown of 29 years, with my autism and difficulties maintaining lasting relationships, the alienation I feel both at work and in the place I have sought for refuge – it feels like I walk through the same door three times before anything clicks. Sometimes, I take a familiar turn only for that turn to lead somewhere confusing and different than what I expected. And just to remind you that this is an article about a video game, these feelings are where In Stars and Time took me. Otherwise, most of the time, I try to find the positive.
And so, in many ways, In Stars and Time is a psychological horror game. As much as it makes me smile, as much as I find it charming, the game cuts deeper than Siffrin’s knife when it wants to. I think anyone stuck in a “loop” of their own will feel the impact of a game like this, the ways in which we trap ourselves and are trapped by circumstance. The madness that Siffrin experiences humanizes these awful feelings more than therapy ever has for me. These aren’t easy things to feel (or write about, frankly), but having this fictional example enables me to process and hopefully heal through my circumstances rather than deny that they are there.
Life is not hopeless, but In Stars and Time makes me remember that it’s okay to admit how hopeless you feel sometimes. There may be no time-freezing King to overcome in the real world, but the struggle is still the same that so many of us face every day. Alas, we keep going. We keep trying. We get up, Mirabelle is there, and we loop again – hoping that this time, we’ll break the loop and make it through.
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