October 23, 2009
Go, Generic Anime Hero with a Pen, Go!
Time Hollow is pretty well exactly what I thought it would be.
It’s an adventure game that’s on the DS. You click on things, and are given descriptions, and you solve puzzles! There’s a story involving a pen that can draw holes in time. It’s pretty well the perfect rental if you’re an adventure game genre fan, and that’s exactly what I did with it. I rented the shit out of it.
I didn’t beat it, though, because it creates several affronts to fun that kept me from wanting to move forward.
One, the entire game is a game of “Find the Cutscene.” You literally have to tap on everything until specific events occur. You can have the solution to a problem way, way before the game wants you to have it, and it will either ignore you, or you will be told you need to come back later, with no real reason given why that’s the case.
Two, the game is full of tiny little miss-able, important items. There are also tiny little things you wouldn’t notice that you have to find to move forward. What’s worse, the game makes a “mechanic” of this, where you have to use the D-pad to pan the screen left and right to see small corners of the scenes for absolutely no reason other than to make the game more difficult.
Three, everyone’s name is an awful clock pun. Every. Single. Name. I could deal with that in a better game, but ugh.
So I sent it back around halfway through. I was having to FAQ my way through it’s generic anime sort of plot, and it just didn’t seem worth my time to keep going. Plus, Gamefly said they were sending me Scribblenauts. Mmm, Scribblenauts.
So yeah, I can’t recommend the purchase unless you are the more die-hard of adventure game fans. But eh, you could rent it if you were really bored. It’s certainly better than, say, Miami Law.