Elsinore

I wish I could have liked this game. There was clearly a lot of effort put into it, and it had a great hook of a story, but I had several major gripes. First, there NEEDS to be a 'skip conversation' button. You should not have to sit through the same lengthy dialogues a million times. It just punishes you for experimentation. I reached a point where I thought I explored everything but the tedium prevented me from revisiting things to fully check out what I may have missed. And indeed, I had missed stuff. Starting each time loop with two unskippable conversations was a pointlessly annoying decision. It's also very frustrating when other plotlines suddenly interrupt you, whisk you away from the scene you were in, and prevent you from engaging in the plotline you were just about to complete. Having to restart and redo all of that is frustrating, especially when you were right there completing it. The time travels forward too quickly. It's extremely easy to miss things, and certainly not fun. The game has an option to fast-forward time when you're waiting around, so I'm not sure why they had to make 'normal speed' time run so quickly and make events so easily missable. This also has the unintended effect of making NPCs do goofy ♥♥♥♥ like sprint full speed to make their appointments on time, which honestly took me a bit out of the game. A queen sprinting around looks foolish. The biggest reason I had to give this game a thumb down was the ending. You spend this whole game trying to stop this evil character, and you're never rewarded for it. It's kind of a slap in the face to basically be told "haha, all your effort was for naught!" Now, I agree that, thematically, this is an interesting way to end the story. And I agree that this would be a fine ending to watch in a movie or a play. But for a videogame that takes hours and hours of your own efforts to complete, especially a game that is built around unskippable repetition, it's just flat out annoying and make you feel like you wasted your time without really getting anything back for all of your efforts. There needs to be more payoff beyond "you, the player, are stuck in hell just like the protagonist! All your efforts were pointless! Bummer!". Why did I even waste my time picking up the game then?

I'm very torn on this game. I think I would recommend it to try just because I appreciate the unique mechanics, but I have to be honest and say that I think it falls at the last hurdle. I experienced this game in 3 sections. The first section was learning the mechanics and the premise and getting familiarized with the characters. It's a bit shaky due to the voice acting but overall the characters feel unique and it's clear pretty quickly there's a lot going on worth being invested in. The second section is where the game really shines as you start to explore and experiment with different story branches resulting in some dramatic, emotional, sometimes funny twists and turns. I would almost recommend the game for this part alone as it's one of the few games to really deliver on the whole, "Your choices have consequences" promise. I would have, if not for- The third section, where you then have to use all those different story branches to create specific endings. From that point on, it's fairly clear what you need to do, but it becomes increasingly tedious as there is no skip conversation button, and there's a lot of conversations. You can skip sentence by sentence, but you have to wait anytime a character plays their distinctly sluggish animations - there's no way to skip a whole "cutscene" if you've already seen it a dozen times before (which you will). So for this whole final section of the game most of my gameplay boiled down to going down a checklist of plot points while mashing the skip dialogue button until realizing that because I forgot to say one random thing to someone on day 1, now I have to restart the run all over again. So the meat of the game is solving puzzles, but then the only payoff is basically having to show your work step by step. What I find interesting is that the writers of Elsinore's story clearly understood and made use of the fact that doing the same thing over and over is torturous and can drive a character mad. But at a certain point, the gameplay itself inevitably becomes that very exercise. Whether that is an intentional integration of one of the themes of the story I can't say, but what I can say is that it stopped being fun.

wonderfully beautiful, well-written and detailed puzzle game - happily sunk hours and hours into this and kept finding new things. really captivating, charming, and thoroughly enjoyable. if you like detailed games, untangling threads, and putting puzzle pieces together, this really scratches those itches for me - while still being witty and enjoyable!! doesn't hurt my MA in English Lit neither ;P kind of like: a literary version of the forgotten city. 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors but with less bombs and without the escape rooms. outer wilds but in shakespearian denmark.

I would highly recommend this game, especially if you love time loop mechanics! I went into this game pretty blind-- I was introduced to it through the easter egg in Outer Wilds, a game I may love more than life itself, and thought, hmm, they sure put a lot of work into this easter egg, must be a pretty good game, right? And I am so glad I checked it out, oh my! It's got it all: time loops with insane amounts of variables, many endings, player choice, interesting characters. I had so much fun going through with my little notebook, writing things down and trying to figure out how to get timelines to work the way I wanted them to. Also something that I have not seen mentioned in a lot of these reviews is that it has some really wonderfully written female, queer and POC characters and storylines-- which instead of feeling forced or like token representation, are driving forces for the plot. It feels like it was written by a diverse team that wanted to write some characters that were like themselves. Excellent! Anyway, all in all, I highly recommend this game!

Not for kids. The greater your personal experience with misfortunes of life, the greater will be the impact of this game on you. Great time-travel, intelligence gathering story-driven game based on "Hamlet". Small choices, big impacts. Good characters. Great lead characters. Endings with morals. Beautiful visuals. Great music. Good UI. Great support for keyboard and mouse, and for controllers too. Great gameplay design. Time cannot go back, but can be fast-forwarded. If player knows exactly what they are doing the result of a time loop can happen less than a minute into a new loop session. Satisfying information gathering. Every new topic feels like a meaningful tool. With a bit of thinking they can manipulate, kill or save lives, if used at the right times. For the price and because so little people know about it, I totally recommend it for mature time traveling games enthusiasts. Turn tragedy into comedy or even fiction! Embrace the choice and never hesitate to go back even after you think you've reached the end.

I would have given this one a positive review just for the Umineko reference, but this is one of the best time loop games I've ever played. The characters are well realized, you get to learn more and more every loop, you get to mess with people, and it's all done in a freeform way that doesn't feel like you're just going down a decision tree. Brilliant game.

I first heard about Elsinore years ago when it was in development, and I'm thrilled to finally be able to play it. I love timeloop games dearly, and this is one of the best I've played.

I expected I would enjoy this game, but not that I would love it. By the end, I was so captivated by the story I didn't really want to put it down. Saying goodbye to these characters was surprisingly hard! They took on lives outside their original source material that I grew attached to, and the things they had to say about the story they're from, stories in general, and life itself really struck me deep. I will be thinking about this game for a very, very long time.

Wow, just wow. I'll be brief, and blunt: I am not a fan of this game's visual style, or its gameplay. This is a glorified visual novel, and that is not a genre I normally enjoy. But Elsinore is a drastic exception for me, because the depth and complexity of the interactive story is simply incredible. This is not an "accessible" game, as it doesn't hold your hand or tell you what to do at all, but the fact I could play through dozens of timeloop worlds and still find something new in each one is beyond impressive. It's not a game for everyone, but those who put in the "work" to play this game will be rewarded. Just when you think the story is wrapping up, a wild twist or other bombshell is dropped on you which opens up the world and expands the story beyond what you expected. As the player, you can not only influence events, but influence WHEN events take place. I can't begin to imagine the effort put into crafting this detailed and dynamic story. Highly recommended if that sort of thing sounds interesting to you. I finally played this game because it was referenced in Outer Wilds, and other than the fact I prefer Outer Wild's focus on exploration, the connection between the two games' timeloop mechanics do not disappoint. [P.S. My game time is incorrect due to offline play on a Steam Deck. I think it was closer to 10 hours to reach one of the endings.]

Tragedy explored in every facet. The antagonist in this game is like a monster I've never quite seen before. It's very original.