Trace Memory

Reviewed by CL on 4/16/2008

Trace Memory is a throwback to the old days of point and click adventures. In this game, you play as a young girl who has been called to a mysterious island by her father who she thought passed away when she was an infant. The game revolves around you trying to uncover the secrets of why her father has been in hiding and also other plots. You do this by exploring rooms using point and click mechanics. You have to figure out puzzles using a lot of innovative methods using the DS features. Some involve touching the screen, some involve the microphone, and other involves even more unique aspects. I must say that the puzzles are the strong suit of the entire game. Some were simple and others were devilishly difficult which required you to think way outside the box.

Some parts that were frustrating about the game were trying to keep all the characters straight. Throughout the course of the game, you are actually unraveling two sets of mysteries involving two different families. However the names and faces all are somewhat similar and the game doesn’t do a good job differentiating who is who. I can’t tell you how often I was confused that Frannie was Henry’s daughter and Thomas as Henry’s brother who had a son Daniel, etc. Another disappointment was the fact that the progression was pretty my entirely linear. You just needed to solve a puzzle in one room and move on and repeat. There were only two or three instances where you needed to backtrack to another room. This actually threw me off a few times because I had already explored a room fully but the game wouldn’t let me pick up an item until I realized I needed it in another future room. This is kind of annoying because when I reached the future room, I didn’t realize that I had already found the item previously, I just need to go back and pick it up now that the game would let me pick it up.

In the end, the game was a short (less than 5 hours) but fun adventure. Since the entire game revolves around puzzles and mysteries, replaying it has little to no value. But if you’re looking for a good mystery that uses the DS in ways you didn’t think possible, definitely check out Trace Memory.