On the surface, Celestial Return looks like a promising RPG, taking heavy inspiration from titles such as Disco Elysium. It blends cyberpunk dystopia with paranormal elements to create a world that feels exciting to explore, and its music tracks and art style further sell that promise. However, it doesn’t take long to see that the appeal is only skin-deep and that these elements are just an artistic mishmash.
It isn’t difficult to get a great idea, or even a billion. In today’s world, humans are surrounded by amazing media for inspiration, talented artists and musicians to hire, and countless people who want to replicate something they love. It isn’t too hard to see where the core appeal of Celestial Return rests, promising a game in a similar vein to the critically and commercially acclaimed Disco Elysium. With a great art style and a wide range of music to draw from, it lends that promise weight. Sadly, it never quite reaches the point of getting outside of the shadow of its main source of inspiration.
This isn’t because the graphics are horrible or the music is bad; both actually stand out as highly pleasant. Not even the writing is bad. It might not be groundbreaking, but it is definitely strong writing. The issue is that Celestial Return lacks the final layer of polish and a clear direction, which keeps its strengths from adding up.
Celestial Return has many outstanding aspects. It has interesting worldbuilding that mixes paranormal elements reminiscent of a Shin Megami Tensei title with bitter cyberpunk themes dripping with biting anti-capitalism. The character designs fit into this world to an almost horrifying degree, and the protagonist feels like the perfect person to follow to call out its horrors.
The gameplay also seems interesting at first. It uses a dice system for decisions, where each die is used up. This means that at the start, the player can pass almost any skill check they desire, but unless they are careful early on, or comb the city for more dice during the playthrough, later on, they will be far more limited in their choices.
In theory, this is a phenomenal way to handle the gameplay. However, there are very few checks in place to prevent the player from accidentally softlocking themselves. Most of the time, it is as simple as failing a skill check and ending up with a bad ending. It isn’t in line with modern game design and feels like something from the old Sierra adventure game days, but it is an acceptable design if going for a throwback experience.
There are, however, some more outrageous examples where the player becomes completely unable to progress and is stuck in a dialogue choice because they simply can’t pay the dice to continue. At that point, all the player can do is hope there is a recent (but not too recent) save, or it is back to the start of the game. All because the player might not have gone to an optional area that happened to contain a lot of dice that the game was balanced around.
In shorter games, such as the aforementioned Sierra adventure games, this is fine. In a story-heavy RPG, though, it feels like an arbitrary waste of time. It isn’t fun to replay four to five hours just because the game suddenly refused to allow progress. It feels like something the developer should have had a backup for. Later in the game, that actually happens as a die magically manifests to help prevent a potential forced bad end.
The other sign of a lack of that much-needed polish is how artistically messy the Celestial Return feels. The music is good, and the visuals are stunning, but some scenes feel very oddly placed. The clearest examples are the cutscenes that play at the start and end of each of the three extremely short books that make up the story. They often feature images and videos from the modern world, with one scene even resembling a music video for a band more than a cutscene in the game itself.
This lack of direction is immersion breaking, almost more so than some of the writing choices. While the worldbuilding is strong, the game sometimes resorts to word choices that break the image of a cyberpunk world. One of the worst examples is using the real-life company name Uber instead of “cab” or “taxi,” which would be more fitting for a world that differs from the real one, where that company doesn’t exist.
It is easy to see how Celestial Return is a seed for a potentially great title. The idea works well in theory, and all of the components are very well made. However, the game lacks the polish needed to feel playable and cohesive as an artistic piece.
