Elsinore

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.

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!

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 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.

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.

As much as I truly love the story being told here, the wonderful list of characters, and how it adapts the Hamlet narrative... this is really only cult classic tier. It is a visual novel that clearly focuses on the characters, but is extremely open, almost too open - leaving the confusing experience of navigating the world for you to figure out for yourself. There is a lot of polish missing that would make this a more appealing and easy game to pick up. It's hard to identify the characters of interest, Polonius, Hamlet and Laertes get in the way when they're really not relevant to the first required part of Ophelia's plot, half of Quince's "hints" point the wrong ways (in fact, the only interesting thing is sending people to Bernardo), and it takes effort to track down people on the map who aren't actively in an event. I think it really would have benefitted from either a dedicated tutorial sequence or act so that you can see how your actions influence the world, and that you complete it once before setting out into the main story. As it is, there are a few explanations of the interface, but very little to help you start picking up on the patterns of what it is you are doing each time you interact with a character. Speaking of that, the interface is functional, but also feels like wading through mud and chewing gravel. You have to click through everything (so I hope you brought an autoclicker or mouse macro from those idle games), popups after every conversation getting in the way, there's no fastforward. The timeline's missing gridlines and only seems to recount the past - extremely predictable events that almost always happen on every cycle are not marked in advance, so I might as just well keep my own notes. It can also be hard to guess how much time it takes to run between each location and then when you get there, the characters will still be coming from another location and then pop into existence. The hotkeys for opening the various panels are nice, but the T key can be a bit awkward and I found myself consulting it basically all the time trying to figure out where I needed to be next. There's also just a lot of text in the idea-sharing panel - almost too much detail. I think some icons or simplification would have helped a lot here (eg taking "The Royal Family" down to "Royals", "Otherworldly Occurances" down to "Occult" and otherwise slimming down each section into a single word, easier to read and understand at a glance). In dialogue, this is especially a problem because not everyone wants to talk about everything, and it's hard to differentiate between all the options -- some you can never say, some you might have already said, some that are conditional, and some that you could say now; there are many states available. Overall, the UX just feels quite underbaked for an experience that almost totally involves managing information all the time. Overall - it is a fascinating experience with great characters, but truly something you need to be prepared to wrestle with and dive into before going in. If you think you can get through the opening bits to catch the spy or obtain the keys, I'd say you would have a good handle on the game. If not, you might stumble trying to figure out how to get through the start and lose interest.

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.

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