Time Hollow

"Time Hollow has some rare moments of quality, but it’s few and far between in this mediocre DS title."

Story 6/10

The basic storyline for this game involves a kid named Ethan and his Family/Friends. During each chapter each of his family member and friends will be involved in some tragic incident, the game basically requires you fix these incidents by changing the past (see gameplay section), once you have done that the story follows on and everything returns to normal, sometimes things get more complicated, but you just simply go back and fix a few other things until everyone is back to normal. That's basically the game in its entirety, which is fine as long as you can back it up with great game design. But it fails.

There is no real depth to the story. It has a few moments where it's engaging and the characters somewhat show signs of emotion, and the anime cut scenes help this, but overall there isn't enough of this and most of the characters seem lifeless and repeat the same things over and over or have overly generic dialogue.


Gameplay- 2/10


This is what hurts the game more than anything; the gameplay is almost non-existent. And to pile more mediocrity in it, it's incredibly repetitive and dull. Every time you enter a scene where you need to go back in time, your pen glows and you have to draw a small opening in which you can interact with (with a limited amount of options) and after that you close the opening and things change…Ethan goes back to completely random places and everyone acts differently, fair enough you've changed the past but the way the story follows on after these events is incredibly poorly constructed and you lose interest in anything that occurs after.

You have a portal bar which reduces every time you close it, so if you make too many mistakes (which is almost impossible) then you will have to start from the beginning of the last save, to refill this bar Ethans Cat “Sox” can be found around certain places and he will refill it for you, but really you don't need to. It's that easy. Going back to the save system it's actually very good, you can save anywhere and that is a good thing since repeating tasks would have been an utmost disgrace. But you have to remember to SAVE!

Another poor design is the navigation system,, there are about half a dozen places to visit and they are located in a map, you can go to these places at any time but the main problem here is that a lot of the times you aren't told where to go which is fine but you have to keep visiting these areas and exiting out of them during most of the chapters, and it's incredibly tiresome, and frustrating at times. Having a multipath system where you can visit any place from anywhere would have reduced the amount of time you have to waste finding out where to go next. There are no side quests in this game, so it's just a silly flaw in the system.

Sound – 7/10

And now we come to the best aspect of the game, even then it's still only “good” and nothing great. The menu tune is the best in the game by far and sometimes when I'm bored I would just take my time looking back through flashbacks just to hear it. Seriously. The games music during the game isn't bad, but the best tunes come on for short period of time (during the tense parts) and the 2 main tunes in the game are repetitive and very uninspiring. IF these had been better maybe the tiresome navigating wouldn't have been so boring. Maybe. The voice from the anime clips and sound effects are not too bad either, overall this is most impressive aspect of the game by a clear mile.

Graphics- 6/10

This is basically an anime game, but while the character models and sceneries look great and well drawn, the animations are just too simple and this is the main reason you can't get into the characters or this entire games storyline. Most of the times when you are talking to someone or a group of people they will have the same animations, and toppled with the horrible dialogue you have conversations that are just dull to watch. Ethan at times repeats what he says a lot of the times like when finding Sox he would repeat “where does he find these things anyway?” Followed by a glowing animation on him that looks cool the first time. Not the 10th time.

Overall – 5/10

This could have been so much better, this game had potential, the basic concept of the story was very interesting, but the execution falls flat on it's face I would not recommend this to anyone, even those who enjoyed hotel dusk and the PW series. Unless you can borrow it for free or get it some other way. Hotel Dusk is my all time favourite Game on DS along with the PW series, so I blindly bought this game wanting to play something of a similar genre. I was heavily let down and I'm sure a lot of other people were too. At the end of the day there will be people who like this, and great for them, but this game will not be remembered as a good DS game, but a below average one that doesn't quite live up to the standards of the genre.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/14/08

Game Release: Time Hollow (US, 09/23/08)