Time Hollow for the DS is an odd little game. It's a Konami developed point and click adventure focusing on a boy named Ethan Kairos, who for his 17th birthday gets possession of a mysterious pen that has the ability to draw holes in time. He can then reach back into the past and alter it, but as he soon finds out, other people may be doing the exact same thing.
Pro-
-Good-looking for a point and click game. It's done in a standard anime style, but they make good use of character portraits and the backgrounds, while few, are pretty well designed.
-The premise is nice; time travel makes for interesting plot developments. That's probably the strongest point to this game. Since every change Ethan makes actually creates a different future, new plot developments are unpredictable. Ethan and others also react to these developments realistically. Also, the plot changes can be pretty dire, and affect the characters in the game dramatically. The very first one is the disappearance of your father and mother, and other chapters deal with time changed to murder someone, or to prevent childhood trauma.
-good sound and nice use of full-motion video. It uses a lot of video, mostly as chapter brackets, and it's both a good length and well produced. The sound can be a repetitive, but fills the mood nicely. Especially noteworthy is the eerie tune that happens whenever the future is changed for the worse.
Con-
-story can be a bit hard to follow and is puzzling. I played this in short bursts over a few nights, so it might also be me, but a lot of the changes caused due to the whole messing around with time seemed to come completely out of left field. In one of the last chapters also you get a bunch of rapid-fire changes which make it hard to track what exactly is going on.
It also doesn't help that the flashbacks used when time is changed are often the same pictures, just repeated. More on this later.
A last gripe is that the localization of the characters' last names is bad. Onegin, Twombly, Twelves, etc...all of them are names based around the numbers on a clock which breaks immersion some.
-short game! 6 hours or less. Considering its still sold for 29.99 US, its not a good value at all.
-It's almost a visual comic. Puzzles are braindead and there is no real gameplay. This is the worst flaw in it. Gameplay boils down to looking on your menu screen at flashbacks, getting the details like time, place, and reason from maybe one person in one location, like the library, and then drawing a hole to interact with a single item in the past. Repeat this across multiple steps, and that's the entire game.
There's an inventory system, but 90% of the items in it are useless, and just acquired as a byproduct of getting the flashback information. There's no branching plot that I could see, no real multiple plot choices that matter, no minigames, and maybe 10 locations in the entire game based around 2 to 3 static screens. For a game about changing the past, its extremely linear, with no derivation from the formula.
It's also very easy. There is no failure in it except for drawing too many time holes, and if you run low on pen energy just look for Ethan's cat Sox for a partial refill. The areas in the past you manipulate are small enough where you will rarely ever get close to empty, and you could probably beat this game without dying.
It is more like a digital comic. You have barely enough interaction to call it a game, and its much more focused on telling its story. It's not bad for what it is, although the story could use more clarity.
I wouldn't really recommend buying it unless you really like point and click adventures. I did enjoy it for what it was, but at its current price its simply too short and not enough of a game to warrant buying. This is the type of game you'd buy for 12.99 used after you beat hotel dusk, and you'd find it enjoyable. Until then though it's not worth the purchase price.
Pro-
-Good-looking for a point and click game. It's done in a standard anime style, but they make good use of character portraits and the backgrounds, while few, are pretty well designed.
-The premise is nice; time travel makes for interesting plot developments. That's probably the strongest point to this game. Since every change Ethan makes actually creates a different future, new plot developments are unpredictable. Ethan and others also react to these developments realistically. Also, the plot changes can be pretty dire, and affect the characters in the game dramatically. The very first one is the disappearance of your father and mother, and other chapters deal with time changed to murder someone, or to prevent childhood trauma.
-good sound and nice use of full-motion video. It uses a lot of video, mostly as chapter brackets, and it's both a good length and well produced. The sound can be a repetitive, but fills the mood nicely. Especially noteworthy is the eerie tune that happens whenever the future is changed for the worse.
Con-
-story can be a bit hard to follow and is puzzling. I played this in short bursts over a few nights, so it might also be me, but a lot of the changes caused due to the whole messing around with time seemed to come completely out of left field. In one of the last chapters also you get a bunch of rapid-fire changes which make it hard to track what exactly is going on.
It also doesn't help that the flashbacks used when time is changed are often the same pictures, just repeated. More on this later.
A last gripe is that the localization of the characters' last names is bad. Onegin, Twombly, Twelves, etc...all of them are names based around the numbers on a clock which breaks immersion some.
-short game! 6 hours or less. Considering its still sold for 29.99 US, its not a good value at all.
-It's almost a visual comic. Puzzles are braindead and there is no real gameplay. This is the worst flaw in it. Gameplay boils down to looking on your menu screen at flashbacks, getting the details like time, place, and reason from maybe one person in one location, like the library, and then drawing a hole to interact with a single item in the past. Repeat this across multiple steps, and that's the entire game.
There's an inventory system, but 90% of the items in it are useless, and just acquired as a byproduct of getting the flashback information. There's no branching plot that I could see, no real multiple plot choices that matter, no minigames, and maybe 10 locations in the entire game based around 2 to 3 static screens. For a game about changing the past, its extremely linear, with no derivation from the formula.
It's also very easy. There is no failure in it except for drawing too many time holes, and if you run low on pen energy just look for Ethan's cat Sox for a partial refill. The areas in the past you manipulate are small enough where you will rarely ever get close to empty, and you could probably beat this game without dying.
It is more like a digital comic. You have barely enough interaction to call it a game, and its much more focused on telling its story. It's not bad for what it is, although the story could use more clarity.
I wouldn't really recommend buying it unless you really like point and click adventures. I did enjoy it for what it was, but at its current price its simply too short and not enough of a game to warrant buying. This is the type of game you'd buy for 12.99 used after you beat hotel dusk, and you'd find it enjoyable. Until then though it's not worth the purchase price.
