Celestial Return Key Art
Image: Metaphor Games & Shoreline Games

There are few games of the past decade as directly inspirational as Disco Elysium, a design so confident it carved out a whole new genre from the well-worn bedrock of computer RPGs. The latest game to riff off its blueprint is Celestial Return, coming to us today from indie studio Metaphor Games, previously of eldritch idle game Cult of the Yellow King. Also openly inspired by Citizen Sleeper, Celestial Return made its humble debut on Kickstarter last year, and today rolled the final product out onto Steam.

It seems that Metaphor Games might have had to scale down the ambition of Celestial Return a little on the way to launch. An early demo teased an adventure spanning three comic-inspired 'books', each with a different setting exploring a different part of its universe. It looks like the game releasing today is just the first of those adventures split into three chapters, but that definitely hasn't put a damper on its artistic ambitions, with the game being a festival of cool east-meets-west comic art and subtle UI animation.

Celestial Return has you playing as Detective Howard, a paranormal detective in the ever-so-slightly haunted future dystopia of Netherveil City. After a run-in with an extradimensional entity, he now carries a sentient rose with him that allows him to talk to the dead, and (as another nod to Disco Elysium) has his stats imbued with their own voices, steering dialogues with hidden dice rolls.

But tipping its hat to Citizen Sleeper, the other mechanical inspiration comes in its visible dice. Rather, you have a consumable pool of them with various perks or flaws that you can pull out to skew important rolls. But these are a finite resource, and once used up are just gone for good, so you've got to trust your gut and know when to gamble. Fitting for a neo-noir detective story.

It certainly looks and sounds the part. The only question is whether the writing—the most important part of all—holds up. A question that I hope to answer once I've gotten my hands on Celestial Return for a proper dig through its narrative. But until then, anyone jumping in early is just going to have to trust in a roll of the dice.

Celestial Return is out now on Steam for a risk-taking-friendly $8.50/$10, with a 20% launch discount running until July 28th. It's published by Shoreline Games, a smaller publisher with an interestingly varied slate of games.