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When The Past Was Around (Xbox One) Review

 

This is a title my wife recommended I try, and I'm quite glad she did! When The Past Was Around is a story-driven point-and-click/puzzle game about coping with loss. It tells a very moving story through a series of chapters that have increasingly complex and interwoven puzzles to solve.

As usual, I will try not to spoil too much the story - but I will warn you that it does get very sad at times and you may need someone nearby to give you a hug. The main characters, Owl and Eda, both communicate with one another on screen, with no spoken dialogue anywhere in the game. The game does a wonderful job of presenting a story without the need for any words, which is a testament to it's great writing and direction. The couple are incredibly sweet and likable, and the artwork in the game is always very soft and pleasant looking- even during its sadder parts. The musical score, while mostly a collection of variations of the same tune, is nonetheless very soothing and cozy. Definitely the sort of soundtrack I would like to listen to while cooking breakfast or taking a walk to in the morning.

The game can be completed in about an hour IF you know all the puzzle solutions, but going into it blind you will likely get much more playtime than that as the game requires you to think and experiment in all sorts of ways, to the point where I filled a couple pages of my "video game notebook" with theories and possible solutions as i studied its puzzles*. Most of the puzzles were fun to figure out, though I did struggle a little with some of them. There is a puzzle at one point where the game doesn't let you know that you have the ability to scroll the screen around with one of the analogue sticks while looking at something, so if you get stuck somewhere, make sure you try that! Towards the end of the game, I encountered a puzzle that I found so confusing it, oddly, gave me a lot of anxiety and I had to take a break from the game before trying again - but that was a puzzle my wife had figured out fine, so you may be able to get by with no trouble as well.

My only other critique of the game would be that if you leave the game idle for a long time- it will suddenly boot you back to the title screen and you will lose all progress on the chapter you were playing. You should be able to get back to where you were as long as you recall your puzzle solutions, but this was still something that felt needlessly mean to the player (especially in an otherwise gentle-feeling game). I'm not entirely sure if it is something the designers did intentionally though, as it could possibly be the result of the Xbox One's annoying function of starting to darken the screen and show pop up tabs about achievements whenever you leave the system idle for too long.

Overall, this is a fantastic game to both exercise your mind and hit you hard emotionally. I recommend getting yourself a notepad, a nice warm drink, somebody (or a pillow) to snuggle up to, and giving this lovely title a go. :)


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* There is something I really like about this part of complex puzzles in games that you get you taking notes in real-life because it leaves you with a physical object to bring back memories of your time playing the game in addition the ones you already formed within your mind. :)
 

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