Borrowing heavily from Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper, Celestial Return has an interesting enough world and story to elevate it above simply being a copycat.
I like mysteries in a story. There’s a lot of fun to be had in trying to unravel a mystery yourself as you experience the protagonist trying to do the same, whether this is in a game, movie, or book. Throw in a striking art style and a whole pile of weirdness, and you’re probably putting together something that I’ll really enjoy. Celestial Return manages to hit these marks, and if it weren’t for a myriad of bugs and the occasional dead end, we’d probably be onto an absolute winner here.
You play as Howard, Paranormal Investigator Division agent who hunts and contains Abstracts. If you know what SCPs are, you’re already in the right ball park. If you don’t think weird creatures that have all sorts of different abilities, some dangerous, some not, and you’ve got the gist. After a difficult altercation with one, Howard begins to work as more of a private detective, helped by one of those Abstracts he was meant to be containing. Howard is given a case to investigate several mysterious suicides, and so he heads out into the dystopian cyberpunk city of Netherveil to find out what connects these deaths, and whether Abstracts or humans are to blame.
The premise itself would be fairly generic if it weren’t for the curveball of Abstracts being creatures that could appear as everyday objects, so there are all sorts of possibilities right off the bat, but you’ll find yourself somewhat railroaded down specific paths, even though there are elements of choice. Describing Celestial Return and being a combination of Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper is fairly apt, as the systems from them are prevalent here. You have the personality traits of Disco Elysium telling you what you should think about the world, with you being able to level up these traits to make them more useful over time. Whilst it’s normally fairly obvious which to listen to and you rarely get a situation where one overtly takes over, it’s a nice twist on a system that’s been used effectively before.
Citizen Sleeper comes in through the dice system. Playing much like a choice driven narrative game, you’ll occasionally have choices that will call on one of your traits with a dice test. You spend dice to try and meet a target, with various modifiers getting involved as you progress further, and once those dice are used, they’re gone. Failure doesn’t always mean game over, although at certain crunch points it might. Interestingly, dice appear to be the currency in this world, so you’ll sometimes acquire more through helping people or just plain finding them.
This presents its own problem though, as there’s no reliable way to regain dice in Celestial Return. You sometimes end up in situations where you’re presented with several tests, but you have no dice and simply cannot pass them. I’ve ended up with a few dead ends from this, which resulted in my having to save scum to save dice in earlier events. Oddly, sometimes these dead ends wouldn’t happen, but other times they would, even with the same choices. I’m not sure if there’s something going on behind the scenes, or if these were bugs.
And bugs are plentiful! As much as I enjoyed the world, story, and systems, I really did not enjoy the bugs. The first one with a biggie, with the game just being a blank screen if I tried to play in 1920 x 1080 resolution. I’m aware other players have had this problem and I believe it’s been patched, but having to drop to 1600 x 900 right off the bat wasn’t a great first impression. Then there are the aforementioned oddities with paths just having dead ends, giving me only options that I can’t select as I don’t have a requisite item. Most egregious though was the fact that sometimes the game wouldn’t let me access the save/load menu, meaning I had to rely on autosaves which are infrequent at best. I lost a good half hour’s worth of time the first time that happened, which was galling. I took to ensuring I could access the menu every time I started Celestial Return from that point on.
In spite of that, I still really enjoyed this. The story and world are really interesting, and there are so many bonkers characters to come across if you go and visit all the side areas. Some of those side quests allow deeper access to other side quests, so there’s a good reason to try and do things in different orders on subsequent playthroughs. You can even unlock hidden personality traits by doing certain tasks. I practically burst out laughing when I acquired one for trying to guess and answer wrong multiple times.
Then there’s the presentation which is nothing short of gorgeous. The grimy art style uses bright colours to make characters pop alongside grungy images for your personality traits. Every single character looks utterly unique, and the Abstracts have all sorts of fun designs. The soundtrack is fantastic too, to the point that I went to add a few tracks to my playlists.
Celestial Return is a really interesting story and world, marred by annoying bugs that let it down. The gameplay loop was enjoyable, and the stories engaging which kept me interested even when I found myself having to replay portions of the game. The visual and auditory wrapping complete a particularly stylish package. If you can put up with those potential bugs, you’re in for a treat.
Celestial Return is available now on PC.
