"Completly Devoid of Fun..."

I like adventure games. You know, Zork, Sam and Max, Monkey Island, those guys. In an age of simpler games, these were what some would consider to be more mind heavy games. Sadly, this genre seems to be dying, at least in it's pure form, largely from lack of interest. The concepts and stories that these games had have been woven into other games, mainly RPGs.

Sadly, Trace Memory is something that belongs with these guys from the 1990's.

Why do I say this? Well, lets start with the good. It's a conspiracy theorist story about a girl who though her parents died when she was young, but finds out her father is alive on an island. The Island was home to a rich family, that all died mysteriously. I will not spoil it for you, so I'll end it here.

The gameplay largely consists of getting past obsticles using the one solution the developers thought of. I'm not saying this is bad, but it sometimes gets to the point where the solution requires a hard to find, hard to notice item in some other location. The game world is quite large, and if you forget to pick up a certain object (say, a key), you will have to backtrack to it.

Graphically, I don't know what the game is trying to achieve here. There is the 3D world, where you move the main character my pointing out where you want her to go with the touch pad, or moving her with the D-Pad. Then there is the detailed views, which are shown in the upper screen as you move around. If you want, you can analyse these, which will reveal clues as to what you're supposed to do next. I don't know why they choose graphics like this, when clearly the game could have been more atmospheric if done in the style of something like Myst.

Puzzles, on the other hand, are either mind numbingly vauge, or dead easy. When a smaller puzzle starts, you have to do something that involves the design of the DS heavily. The include lighting candles, fixing a sign... boring stuff. There are some imaginative puzzles, namely, one where you must reflect one screen of the DS off the other to see a password. Another has you closing the DS to simulated the stamping of a woodblock painting. Other then those, many of the puzzles fell like Warioware Touched rejects.

Another halmark of the old Adventure Genre was Dialogue. Sam and Max was funny, Full Throttle was rather dark... this is just sad, and not sad, tragic sad... I'm saying really plain dialogue, there's barely any emotion in anything.

All in all, Trace Memory was completed in about 2 and a half hours. I can't imaging spending any more time with it. I could play through the game for extra bonuses, but I don't feel like doing that again. Deep down, I simply feel that I had no fun whatsoever with this. I can't think of any game I've played in the last while that was so empty of fun. I've played games that were frustrating on hair pulling level, but they were funner, and more rewarding, then this. Stay away from this snoozer. It might have been a decent movie, but it fails as a game.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/14/05