Astrologaster

Full of wit and whimsy, Astrologaster is an excellent comedy set in the Elizabethan era. Its characters are always introduced with song, its themes are carefully developed and subverted, its twists are made to be silly and humorous: boasting some great writing by Katherine Neil, the game more than makes up for its simple visual design.

The protagonist is doctor Simon Forman, a man who doesn’t let boring details like not having a medical license stop him from calling himself a doctor. You see, instead of medicine and science, Simon uses astrology to help people, seeing in the sky the solution to their various earthly plights. So, I believe you can understand why his growing success starts to bother the College of Physicians, which vows to prove Simon a fraud.

Astrologaster’s structure is a simple one. Each patient is briefly introduced by a choir, which often makes fun of them, exposing their problems and flaws, giving us context regarding their personality, their goals, and their agenda. After the music and chorus, they come to doctor Forman and explain what ails them – it doesn’t have to be a medical issue – and the good doctor pledges to look at the stars for an answer. This is where we come in: we must choose which reading Simon should make from the available options.

Simon has a clear goal: he wants to be taken seriously by his peers, even though his craft is more akin to fortune-telling than actual physic. To that end, he needs to get eight letters of recommendation, which will prove that, unlike all odds, he’s not a fraud, and he’s perfectly capable of practicing his craft. We have a total of thirteen querents, which luckily leaves some room for error and experimentation.

At first, choosing the right answer is not a difficult task. One patient, for example, explains that he’s feeling great pain during urination and in his lower back. We may choose the reading of the stars that says that he has kidney stones, dysentery, or is suffering from gout. In other words, we’re not actually using astrology to find an answer; we’re using it to validate an opinion that has already been formed by our real-world knowledge: the stars are not the source of the diagnosis, but a tool to make our patients believe it. Sometimes, even Simon himself will comment about how he already knows what the problem is, but will study the alignment of the planets nonetheless – you know, just to be sure.

This is made even clearer when both the player and Simon don’t know what the right answer is beforehand: when dean Thomas Blague asks for guidance as to which expedition he should invest in, Simon doesn’t have a clue (for obvious reasons), which means that we’ll just have to choose a reading at random – or try to figure out if Blague is talking of real expeditions and search what happened to them. Either way, the stars by themselves don’t help in the slightest, which makes Simon’s repeated claims that he’s using a bulletproof scientific method sound even more ridiculous.

Discovering the truth is not always the best course of action, however, for our patients are characters with peculiar motivations. There’s one that inquires about the gravity of their partner’s illness, but they are not really wanting to find a cure, but… a pretext. Another character may not want the right diagnosis for their symptoms, but the wildest one, since they are a hypochondriac: since the goal is to get in their best graces and not necessarily help them, there are times when we’re encouraged not to read their symptoms to find the right diagnosis, but to read their character traits to find out what they want to hear.

It’s not every game that introduces its characters with a song – and a polyphonic madrigal to boot – and these songs always hand us some hints about their personalities to point us in the right direction, sometimes warning us that they are no fools; sometimes laughing at them precisely because they are:

“Almighty God

Guide thy servant Thomas Blague

Reach forth thy gracious hand

And slap sense into him.”

These madrigals serve other functions as well. Sometimes, they talk about the nature of a character’s narrative arc: the verse “She is but a lady” that ends every introduction about Emilia Lanier explains how her troubles are connected to her gender, framing her attempts to become a successful writer as doomed from the start. Other times, the verses are reverent and respectful, but in a deeply ironic way: Archbishop John Whitgift, for example, is introduced as God’s faithful servant, but it doesn’t take long for him to show a certain predilection for Simon’s young manservant William.

The humor often comes from the characters’ blatant hypocrisy – they are usually scandalized by sins they themselves commit – or from their ridiculous ignorance. After serving a raw, green, exotic vegetable called “potahto,” a noblewoman and her guests are suddenly stricken by incessant purging and indigestion. The writing mocks the rich and the pious, displaying the former’s stupidity and the latter’s lack of empathy.

There are also several plotlines converging: many of the problems Simon must solve are of his own making. A patient’s plight might be closely related to the ill-advised guidance Simon offered to another one – and sometimes the doctor is also pushed to reveal information about them or is tempted to use this information in his favor.

The absurd nature of some of the cases or of the treatment suggested by Simon also helps make the narrative funnier: the good doctor, for example, can advise a patient suffering from intestinal worms to fast for two days and then smell a bowl of porridge so as to tempt the worm to leave their body for the food. The narrative shows that Simon is not completely ignorant when it comes to his craft, which doesn’t mean that he won’t claim now and again that the cause of a man’s strange desire to laugh and dance everywhere is the tarantula that bit him. Since there isn’t much of a penalty for failing to acquire a medical license for Forman, we’re actually encouraged to just play with the system and choose the funniest answer.

Simon, meanwhile, is depicted as a pathetic man. He’s full of himself, defending the notion that he’s using science to come to every diagnosis; that’s he’s a doctor not just of the body but also of the soul – this is why he promises to solve any sort of problem, not just medical ones – and that the College of Physicians is just jealous of his success. He’s a man who masks his incompetence with pretty words and conspiracy theories, and who is constantly getting into trouble because of the absurd advice he gives. He truly believes what he preaches, however, which gives a touch of pathos to his journey: he’s a conman who has fooled even himself.

The only problem regarding Astrologaster’s story is that the ending is anticlimactic. The narrative is building up to a final confrontation with the College of Physicians, but it never happens, making a game that starts with a wonderful madrigal end with a whimper.

Presentation-wise, Astrologaster uses a storybook aesthetic that fits the tone of the narrative, making the game look and sound like a play – there’s even a good pun with the word at the end. It’s pretty simple, however, with the backgrounds never changing through the course of the game, which can make it, well, visually repetitive.

But Astrologaster is a game about its writing, not its visuals. With a fascinating – and pretty detestable – cast of characters, Astrologaster offers a witty, charming, bawdy story that certainly leaves an impression.

January 23, 2026.