A Cyberpunk Mystery in a Brutal World

Celestial Return is a wonderfully strange cyberpunk mystery set in the kind of dystopian world that makes the real world feel somehow less miserable. The majority of the game happens through text and dice rolls, but you get to see hand-drawn backgrounds for visual references that remind me of classic comic books in their style.

The blend of Cyberpunk 2077, Disco Elysium, and Dungeons and Dragons makes Celestial Return a unique experience that might not play out the way you want it to. I know that my own path ended up not going the way I might’ve hoped, and a big reason for that was my bad luck with dice rolls leading to most of my rolls failing, which then makes me miss information or opportunities that would’ve been useful to have later.

After reviewing Moonlight Peaks, a cozy game, Celestial Return gave me a chance to dive into a much darker world where it feels like alliances take the place of friendships because you can’t trust anyone, and everybody is too busy dealing with living in Netherveil to focus on much outside of survival. It’s a game with a darker tone in a dystopian way, which feels like a fascinating view of how the future could turn out in a bad timeline.

As soon as you launch the game, you hear the music and sound effects that will be with you throughout the experience. Since Celestial Return is highly text-based with a few moments of being able to control your character in the world, the artwork, music, and sound effects have to take more of the burden of immersing you in the game. I found that these elements were strong and consistent enough to keep me immersed.

I believe the comic book style used for the art is called pop art, but either way, it felt like a fitting choice. It gives you the feeling of being the main character in a noir comic series, and it keeps the world from feeling too desperately dark. I also love the character designs. The world of Celestial Return comes through the designs, and you’re able to start putting together the culture and lifestyle of Netherveil through it.

I did experience a few glitches, which sometimes happen with early copies, so those glitches could be absent from the released version. The main problem I had was when launching the game. I would have a black screen with a flashing rectangle where the menu should be, and I would be unable to interact with anything. After force-stopping the program and launching it again, it would launch properly. It’s a minor issue, but it was annoying, so I hope that the core of that issue is fixed in the final release version.

You’re Dropped Right Into the Action

When you start Celestial Return, you’re put right in the middle of the action. I was a little confused, because the characters are talking about creatures that I obviously haven’t been introduced to yet, but that made me want to learn something about them. That didn’t take long, as you get a decent idea of the strange events happening in Netherveil that entities are trying to keep hidden quite quickly. I find this to be more effective than stating information outright, and more memorable.

Unfortunately, my first encounter with the Abstracts didn’t go as I wanted, because I failed my dice rolls. However, I decided to keep going instead of starting over and trying again, because that felt disingenuous for my first run through a game I’m reviewing. This mechanic of using luck as part of the story adds stakes to each encounter that you wouldn’t feel in a visual novel, as you don’t have a guarantee that you can go forward with the option you picked. If it requires a die roll, you could fail and have to try a different choice.

The Mechanics Make You Careful

The way that dice rolls work in Celestial Return isn’t the same way they work in a game like Baldur’s Gate 3. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you always have at least one dice you can roll, and you can add bonuses to that. However, Celestial Return makes dice into a currency. You can increase your odds of succeeding by using more dice, as it’s your choice how many to use up to the max set by the game. The difficulty sets in when you learn that dice can be used once. After you use dice, they’re consumed and gone from your inventory.

As a result, you’re unable to just throw the max number of dice at every roll to try and pass all of them, and you have no idea how many dice you might need later or if you’ll find more dice before you reach another roll. So now, you’re in this constant state of questioning how much you should risk for each roll, or if you’re better off picking an option that doesn’t require a roll and hoping for the best in terms of where the story goes with that. While I thought that Celestial Return would be straightforward and easy like a visual novel, the dice mechanic alone made it difficult and stressful, but in a good way.

Celestial Return is a worthy successor for Disco Elysium, and it’ll be of particular interest if you like Cyberpunk 2077 as well. I went into the game only knowing that it had a similar style, and I came out of it having enjoyed the entire experience. While it’s not perfect, and I would like more locations to explore in the city or more anatomy for moving around Netherveil, the overall experience of Celestial Return was an interesting ride through a dystopian location. I actually plan on playing through it a few more times to see if I can get other random encounters and if I can pass rolls I failed the first time to find out how that changes my path forward.