Ratings and Reviews by autumnc

Stay? is a game with a time loop as its core mechanic. You'll go back in time over and over in order to save the magical world of the game from a comet that will destroy everything. Each loop took no more than 10-15 minutes, shorter on repeats since you don't have to re-read text, but there might be a lot of loops.

Within each loop, the world can change a great deal. Your choices affect the entire shape of the plot, which runs for a period of 10 years, from entering magical college, through adulthood, until the destruction wrought by the comet. It's kind of a life simulation, where you play through key moments in the player character's life, and skip over years of "boring" stuff. There is a lot of branching; you can win, lose, or avert a war, enter into any number of relationships, pick one of at least three different professions, and either fail or succeed in stopping the comet. By exploring the different branches, you gather information, and eventually can craft a path that allows you to stop the comet's impact. But even if you succeed, you might still redo the time loop because you failed to save a key character.

I really enjoyed this game. I liked the balance between a lighthearted and more serious tone. I enjoyed the relative sparsity of the prose, which belies a lot of complexity and worldbuilding. I liked the depth of characterization; all of them have hidden aspects and secrets that might only become apparent on multiple playthroughs. There is a lot of depth to this game in general.

It took me almost 15 loops to finally defeat the comet, but there is still a lot of content I missed.

I'm not sure if this is intentional or unintentional, but this was a darkly funny game.

So, I trained my way up to the Olympics, got a silver medal at the Olympics at age 18, became a pro in Nigeria, and on my first pro fight, died. RIP Sakura. She never had the chance to retire and breed :(

This game can be painfully slow sometimes, with a lot of timed text, and grinding by repeatedly reading generic inspirational quotes by everyone from Mahatma Gandhi to Chairman Mao (you have to wait until the stat upgrade flies in or it won't change your stats). Not getting into the disturbing implications of grinding endurance and "rockstar juice" via "booty calls" (you start at age 15), but it is a thing that happens, and it is your only interaction with other people besides combat and training for combat. Yeah. Beneath the hood, there are a lot of stats, grouped into "mind" and "body". Somehow, these stats affect your chance of victory in fights. The larger the numbers, the better, of course. Victory also probably has a random component. I've noticed that the longer the bar is, the more likely I am to win, but I don't know how the bar is determined.

The main form of entertainment in this game is to watch numbers go up. This is the heart of all management games, and with interactive fiction, you can see game mechanics distilled down to their very essence. It is almost impossible to strategize about where to click because of the opacity of the mechanics. But the more you click, the more numbers go up. The more numbers go up, the more you win. The more you win... well, I don't know what comes next because Sakura died, and I'm not going to replay this to see.