What do you get if you lock Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk and Trace Memory in a room with a Barry White CD playing?
This kid will have a lot of questions when he’s older…
DO: A lot of reading, cause time paradoxes and get really confused… in a good way.
TYPE: Point & Click adventure game.
PLATFORM: DS
PRICE: $29.99
MEAT: If you’ve played an Ace Attorney game or Hotel Dusk: Room 215, you’ll be right at home with Time Hollow. The game plays like a combination of an interactive novel and an old Lucasarts/Sierra point & click adventure, with inventory management and conversation trees galore. Thankfully, it’s all done in a clean, simple way with minimal backtracking and plenty of hooks to move the story along.
Time Hollow deals with your character, Ethan Kairos, who wakes the day of his 17th birthday to find that everything in his life doesn’t seem right. His parents, who were just having dinner with him the night before, have now been missing for 12 years. Friends go missing for days despite Ethan having just talked to them moments earlier. Am I hurting your brain? Don’t worry. It all makes a lot more sense in the game proper and a large part of the game’s plot involves trying to unravel the cause of these paradoxes.
That’s where the Hollow Pen comes into play. Ethan uses this device to ‘dig’ into the past and find clues to the unraveling chronosphere around him.
PERKS: The production values on Time Hollow are VERY impressive for a DS game and that, plus the excellent translation from the original Japanese, make it a must-own game for fans of the waning point & click adventure genre. I was quite impressed with the number of animated (and fully voiced) cutscenes in the game as well.
VERDICT: Buy. If you’ve enjoyed the Ace Attorney games and want something with a little more actual gameplay and a more serious storyline (and time travel!) or are a fan of point & click adventure games in general, run, don’t walk, to the store to get this game. You won’t be sorry…
Very cool concept. The use of the touchscreen seems pretty cool. Are you limited to the amount digging you can do? Seems like it would be easy to “dig” up everything.
I’m intrigued. I’ll be adding it to my Gamefly queue.
Yes, you have to find clues to determine where and how far back you should ‘dig’ into the past. You also only have a certain number of charges in your pen at a given time and if they run out while you’re searching for a clue in the past, that’s it. Game over, man!
The further you go in the game, the trickier the game gets. It’s fascinating to watch the story unfold as the more you try to fix the present by monkeying with the past, the more damage you cause, thereby giving you more things to go back and fix.