I'm branching out into occasional games reviews (as heck, I don't do anything else with this blog...)
First up, a game I just imported from the US.
Time Hollow
Time Hollow (Konami) is another one of the rather spiffy range of Japanese graphical adventure games that are available for the Nintendo DS. (See also: Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Trace Memory/Another Code, Phoenix Wright/Apollo Justice, Professor Layton - well, it is, even if the puzzle solving aspect is a little more "in-your-face" than normal - and so on).
To be honest, "adventure game" is possibly a bit much for this one, it's much more of a visual novel than some of the others. Hotel Dusk, for example, is slightly more non-linear and has a lot more possible endings based on some of your choices. The same is true of Trace Memory/Another Code. The Phoenix Wright/Apollo Justice games are as linear but much more "work" to proceed through. Time Hollow is very linear (although once you've played through it once there are some options to do things differently second time through, plus an alternative path through the game which is very, very clever) and not difficult at all to proceed through.
I won't go into the plot too much, partially because it would probably be spoileriffic but more because it's pretty complex and would require the use of a blackboard in "Back to the Future II" style. Basically, towards the start the hero gets a widget that allows small windows to be opened into the past, small things to be changed, and then the changes to the timeline become the current reality. The hero spends most of the game avoiding various crises, finding out where, when and how things need to be changed, manipulating the past to change the present, and then usually finding out that the present is still not optimal and having to change the past again at a different point or in a different way.
This means the linearity of the game is in some ways an advantage; if it was more open it would be very, very confusing indeed and you could easily become impossibly stuck. Instead it does play like an interactive novel with the plot being driven onwards by your actions. At key plot points there's animated cutscenes that are actually fairly decently voiced and reaching them feels very rewarding.
I did have a couple of occasions where the interface annoyed me; one was that during "plot" conversations you usually have to ask the person the same conversation option twice to get all the information out of them, and the other was the problem endemic to this type of game - not finding the "something" in the environment that you need to click on to get anywhere, and hence being stuck. Thankfully such moments are rare in Time Hollow - the game tends not to let you leave a conversation or a room if there's something you haven't yet done. There are a few periods of going through all the locations just to find out where to go next, but the writers seem to recognise this and often you'll find something or someone unexpected when doing so.
It's not a superb game but it's a very good example of the "visual novel" genre. The time manipulation aspects of it excellent; if you think of your favourite clichéd time travel plot points from films and TV you'll find most of them here, apart from becoming your own grandfather (at least not that I noticed). The plot is intriguing, none of the characters are actively annoying (although most do have bad haircuts), the animated cutscenes are engaging, the occasional voice acting is not bad at all, and the J-Pop theme tune is catchy. The in-game music is as irritating as in-game music normally is though...
Weirdly, I just checked the European PEGI rating for the upcoming European release and it's 7+ (and 6+ in Portugal, oddly). The US ESRB rating is T (Teen) and the Japanese CERO rating is 12+. It's both too complex and too violent by far for a 7+, I'd say. Nasty things happen to people in the game, and even if they end up not counting because time is edited they could still be an issue for younger children. (The Phoenix Wright games and Trace Memory/Another Code are the same - 12+/T in Japan/US, 7+ for PEGI. Only Hotel Dusk: Room 215 seems to be 12+ everywhere. Odd.)
Overall, certainly worth a look. It's not much of a game, but it is a very good story well executed.
