All 13 endings reached, including the 2 secret endings. In many ways, Elsinore is incredible, weaving an intelligently-told time-looping story around the setting of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The game sees the player taking control of Ophelia, who, after being killed within a couple of days, find herself waking up again into an ever-repeating loop, doomed to die repeatedly in some manner within at most four days. The task, then, is to explore Elsinore castle from an overhead perspective, interacting with its various inhabitants (via a point-and-click interface) in the hopes of working out what is causing the loop and, eventually, how to break it.
It's an engrossing premise, told with superb writing throughout and the level of detail and nuance available in the character interactions, alongside the huge range of permutations of events, is a highly laudable achievement. There's the occasional nod to actual Shakespearian dialog that's enjoyable to spot, but not overused and the game is perfectly accessible to someone with no knowledge of the source material. Of course, Hamlet is a tragedy, so don't expect happy endings to be in abundance!
It must be said that some extent of repetition is pretty much inherent in the time-loop premise, which can become a bit frustrating when exploring events that take place later in a cycle. A fast-forward control alleviates this to some extent, but a way to accelerate the text-based dialog further would have been appreciated. Just occasionally, the event logic breaks a little - so you might encounter, for example, references to a character who's just died as if they're still alive - but this is rare and honestly, with the complexity that's involved here, this is forgivable. These relatively minor shortcomings aside, Elsinore is among the strongest examples of a timeloop-based game that you could hope to find.
It's an engrossing premise, told with superb writing throughout and the level of detail and nuance available in the character interactions, alongside the huge range of permutations of events, is a highly laudable achievement. There's the occasional nod to actual Shakespearian dialog that's enjoyable to spot, but not overused and the game is perfectly accessible to someone with no knowledge of the source material. Of course, Hamlet is a tragedy, so don't expect happy endings to be in abundance!
It must be said that some extent of repetition is pretty much inherent in the time-loop premise, which can become a bit frustrating when exploring events that take place later in a cycle. A fast-forward control alleviates this to some extent, but a way to accelerate the text-based dialog further would have been appreciated. Just occasionally, the event logic breaks a little - so you might encounter, for example, references to a character who's just died as if they're still alive - but this is rare and honestly, with the complexity that's involved here, this is forgivable. These relatively minor shortcomings aside, Elsinore is among the strongest examples of a timeloop-based game that you could hope to find.