Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
All Roads<\/em> lite: the player character is a temporally-maladjusted killer, and the goal is not so much to reach the game’s ending as to figure out what the heck is really going on.<\/p>\n The game starts in the aftermath of a murder. You’re told that your motive was revenge, but really, the details are so irrelevant that you never even learn the victim’s name. The real meat of the game starts when you’re out on the street and notice a man standing next to his own corpse. I thought for sure that I had hit a bug at that point, and that I wasn’t supposed to be seeing both of those things at once, but the game dispelled this notion pretty quickly by referring to them both in a single sentence. So good job there. It’s all too easy to lose the player’s trust when portraying something weird or surreal, but the author here was smart enough to understand where extra clarification is needed.<\/p>\n Two more duplicated persons appear\u00a0before you reach home. In all cases, one of them disappears before you leave; The whole idea is that you’re experiencing the events before the murder in reverse. This isn’t quite the same as time simply running backward; spoken words, for example, are intelligible, if enigmatic. The epilogue shows the same events forward. And it really is the same events: if you perform actions slightly differently, or in a different order (not often possible; the game is pretty linear), this is reflected in the forward version. Hooray for thoroughness of implementation. The duplicated persons represent alternatives. They’re people whose immediate situation could go either of two ways depending on your actions, so until you reach the moment where you perform those actions, both potentialities are present. Mind you, this means that the version of the person remaining after you determine the outcome isn’t either of the alternatives, but rather, the state of the person before<\/em> you act. If, forward, they started off in an unhappy state, the act of stopping to help them, played backward, will unhelp them, erasing the happy version from the world and leaving just the unhappy one, which seems weirdly callous until you’ve got it all figured out. <\/p>\n I like the conceit here, which has a good riddle quality, but I feel like it has more potential than this game displays. Steve Meretzky managed to make an entire chapter of Spellcasting 101<\/em> about time-reversed actions, and he didn’t even have the concept of alternatives to play with. Keepsake<\/em> is less than a chapter; it’s essentially a proof of concept, and doesn’t explore that concept in a great deal of depth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[84,53,507],"class_list":["post-1998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-if","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1998"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4945,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998\/revisions\/4945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}which one depends on your actions<\/del>. You might start to form a theory about what’s going on, but before you can confirm or act on it, the game ends and spells everything out in a lengthy epilogue — one that’s about as long as the game that preceded it, in fact. And now, I’m going to spell everything out too, because it’s difficult to comment on otherwise.<\/p>\n