Celestial Return Reviews
Celestial Return is a worthy successor for Disco Elysium, and it'll be of particular interest if you like Cyberpunk 2077 as well.
Celestial Return is a narrative gamble that blends investigation, cyberpunk, and cosmic horror in a decaying city where every choice matters.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Celestial Haven boasts a striking, hyper-stylized fusion of cyberpunk and cosmic horror, but the atmosphere is strangled by a lack of overall polish and cohesion.
Celestial Return takes the best elements of the Disco-likes, then adds a couple of clever mechanics to carve out an identity of its own.
Celestial Return is a good cyberpunk adventure that doesn’t make it easy for players to fully enjoy it. Main characters Howard and Rose are very interesting, and the cyberpunk city they live in is filled with interesting encounters.
Celestial Return leaves as bitter a taste as the capitalist dystopia it aims to portray. While the art, music, and story are stunning in their own right, they create an immersion-breaking mishmash that, at times, makes no sense. It feels more like the development team wanted to throw everything they found cool into a single title without considering how it would all work together. Nowhere is this clearer than in the gameplay, which, due to design oversights in the addition of more layers, leads to an extreme number of potential softlocks. In shorter games, it is fine, but in a six-hour story-driven RPG, not so much.
Celestial Return is a pleasant surprise that successfully blends cyberpunk aesthetics, cosmic horror, and dice-based RPG mechanics into a compelling experience. While there's still room for improvement, it already delivers an excellent atmosphere, memorable characters, and a choice-driven system that makes every playthrough feel unique. If you're a fan of dark futuristic worlds and games where your decisions truly matter, Celestial Return is definitely worth checking out. –
Celestial Return is not a game that can be fairly reduced to either its shortcomings or its successes. Its most interesting qualities and its most evident limitations come from the same source: an ambition to bring several different forms of interactive storytelling into a single experience. There are clear points of friction. Map navigation can occasionally disrupt the otherwise measured pace of the narrative, the game's many mechanics are introduced faster than they can comfortably be absorbed, and the launch version was affected by technical issues that required further refinement. Yet these limitations sit alongside a production with a distinctive artistic voice, consistently strong writing, an accomplished soundtrack and an RPG system capable of giving genuine mechanical weight to narrative decisions. The personality system offers perhaps the clearest indication of the project's potential. By making the protagonist's personality an active part of the gameplay, Celestial Return gives its conversations a greater sense of role-playing, allowing the character being shaped by the player to influence the way certain situations unfold. The dice system complements that philosophy in a different way, introducing resource management and uncertainty that can turn seemingly simple choices into decisions worth considering. Not every system receives the refinement it deserves. This is where the game's greatest sense of missed potential ultimately lies. Celestial Return repeatedly approaches something genuinely distinctive, but it does not always give its ideas enough space to work together with the same clarity. The foundations are strong, the identity is unmistakable, and the ambition is evident; what is occasionally missing is the final layer of cohesion that would allow all of those qualities to reinforce one another. Even so, Celestial Return remains an intriguing proposition for anyone drawn to cyberpunk fiction, visual novels, narrative RPGs and investigative storytelling. It is uneven, but rarely uninteresting. And when its systems finally align with its writing, artwork, music and atmosphere, the result offers a compelling glimpse of the game it is capable of becoming.
Metaphor Games’ Celestial Return wonderfully nails the tension-filled angst with a twinge of hope in its world-building and presentation. However, this doesn’t coalesce with the plot or gameplay, creating some dissonance in the dice-powered narrative RPG.
Celestial Return possesses one of the most interesting new worlds among modern narrative games, successfully blending cyberpunk with cosmic horror in an innovative way. However, the game seems closer to an excellent visual novel trying to present itself as an RPG, despite not reaching the point of being a true role-playing game. If the developers had succeeded in improving the dialogues, providing more creative outcomes for failure, and granting players greater freedom in shaping events, it would have transformed into one of the most prominent indie narrative games this year. Currently, it is a very good experience in terms of world and story, but it still stumbles due to some decisions that stand in the way of what it is trying to achieve.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
I have had a really good time with Celestial Return so far and look forward to playing more. There is a surprisingly complex narrative and socially relevant too. There are lots of shades of grey and not just because of the dystopian cyberpunk setting. Leaning into Howard’s 5 mental traits was interesting, especially when feeling a little gung-ho. I do wish the dice mechanic was more generous, as it often led to hitting a wall in the story. The graphics and audio were great at setting the tone and scenes, especially as there’s plenty to do in the game. I give Celestial Return the Thumb Culture Gold Award.
Celestial Return rewards your curiosity with exceptional world-building, memorable atmosphere, and meaningful choices, but inconsistent balancing and frustrating progression keep an otherwise excellent cyberpunk RPG from fully realizing its remarkable potential.
Celestial Return is an ok riff on the melody Disco Elysium perfected.
I’m a bit disappointed in how it comes together, but there are moments that really work. The setting is cool and has a lot of potential. They have a flair that could really work with some tweaking.
Celestial Return is a visually captivating detective RPG elevated by exceptional atmosphere, intelligent storytelling, and meaningful choices, yet restrained by uneven balancing and limited polish. Despite that, it is an ambitious indie experience that earns attention.
Communicating your inspirations in the marketing of your game may cause people to compare your title to the ones you reference. In the case of Celestial Return, it isn’t a matter of copying those who came before, but of wearing the similarities as a badge of honor. While the gameplay and art direction may be inspired by other intellectual properties, Celestial Return takes them and builds on them even further. The way you generate new dice might need some extra balancing, as their use as both a resource for investigations and currency for shops makes you lose them a bit too quickly. But the strong narrative and visual design elevate this game to be its own source of inspiration for future teams to build upon.
Yet, despite the distracting irregularities, Celestial Return finds its footing when it shifts its focus to the political architecture of Netherveil. The narrative leans heavily into the weight of fascism, citizens' complicity in building it, and how the gears of those systems crush individual lives and the aspirations of its people.
Celestial Return establishes itself as a high-quality narrative RPG that elevates the genre through a successful blend of cyberpunk and cosmic horror.
Review in Italian | Read full review