Time Hollow
Score: 75% ESRB: Teen Publisher: Konami Developer: Tenky Media: Cartridge/1 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Graphics & Sound: Thanks to the success of the Phoenix Wright series, the previously PC-only point-and-click adventure genre is finding a home on the DS. Time Hollow is the latest entry in the system's adventure library and though the story is intriguing, the gameplay reduces a great game to an okay one. Despite a few well-produced animated scenes, most of Time Hollow takes place in static environments. Even when compared to other adventure games, there isn't a whole lot to interact with in each location. However, one really cool aspect is that you can pan slightly to the left and right in each location. This produces a really neat shifting effect that gives the room some depth, but also plays into the clue hunt aspect of gameplay. Although some are lying out in the open, clues are usually hidden behind objects. Panning is very limited, thankfully, so you won't ever find yourself on a pixel hunt or lost about what clue to find next. The visuals are punctuated with a few bits of voice acting. The voicework is good, but neither it nor music is particularly impressive. However, it gets the job done, which is about all you could reasonably ask for in a DS game.
Gameplay: With games like Time Hollow, story is a core element. Although most of the gameplay involves searching for clues and solving puzzles, the story is what is going to keep you interested in what are essentially a bunch of random activities. Here you play as Ethan Kairos, a teen with a bit of a time problem. On the night of his 17th birthday, he dreams that his parents disappeared 12 years ago. When he wakes up, he learns that the dream wasn't a dream. Everything he saw really happened, leaving his memory all jumbled up. Even more mysteriously, Ethan finds a pen with a note from his father. With the pen Ethan can interact with the past, setting him up for a quest to restore his reality. But, someone else has a pen as well and their reality doesn't match up with Ethan's. While the story is engaging and a bit unpredictable, gameplay isn't. Regardless of the problem you are trying to solve, there's an overly predicable rhythm to figuring them out. Episodes begin with a couple of jumbled flashbacks showing events from Ethan's life. Only a few of the flashbacks are important to that episode, though figuring out which ones don't fit doesn't take much thought, especially since one or two usually pertain to the previous episode's conclusion. From there, the game follows a familiar pattern: find the locations, talk to people and piece together what happened. Once Ethan has verified the time and dates of events in his flashbacks, he can return to a crucial location and, using his Hollow Pen, open a portal to another time line and fix the issue. Sometimes Ethan will need to place a key object in the other timeline while other times, he needs to pull something into his own timeline.
Difficulty: A key problem with the gameplay is that there isn't much to figure out. With the exception of one or two episodes, the solution is fairly obvious. Even with "harder" puzzles, the solution is usually clear, though you have to poke around the entire town and talk to a bunch of random people before the game catches up to the solution you discovered 15 minutes earlier. Granted, this problem is a common problem for the genre, but Time Hollow feels a little too restricting. Ethan will ignore clues until he's talked to someone else. Although this works for the story's dramatic flow, it is frustrating for players. You rarely feel like you're actively participating in the story, instead you're just spinning your wheels until the story gives you the green light to continue.
Game Mechanics: The only interesting mechanic in Time Hollow comes when you finally get a chance to muck around with time, which is called "digging." Once Ethan figures out what to do (or rather, the game lets you go there), you can draw a circle with the pen, opening a portal to the time when the flashback initially took place. When you begin digging, a picture of the flashback appears on the top screen while its current state appears on the bottom. You would think it would be a big help in figuring out which area to circle, though the game is picky about the "correct" location. Even if the target is clearly visible through the portal, the game won't accept it unless you've hit a particular spot. Every time Ethan digs, it depletes a bar of energy from the pen, which acts as a life bar of sorts. Running out of energy isn't a problem throughout most of the game, though later on when you have to dig multiple times, you'll want to be careful about where you dig, so the finicky nature of the digging mechanic does become more of a problem later on. However, if you are running low on power, you can find Ethan's cat, Socks, who can give you a boost. Story is what carries Time Hollow, so if you're willing to overlook somewhat shallow play mechanics and repetitive, mindless gameplay, it should at least give you a lazy weekend's worth of entertainment.
-Starscream, GameVortex Communications AKA Ricky Tucker
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