You always hate to see it: you’re sitting there, minding your own business, when suddenly your entire family just up and disappears. Yeah, it’s annoying all right, and Ethan Kairos has just about had enough of the spontaneous evaporation of his loved ones. Thus, he sets out to unravel the mystery of their disappearance, and in the process, he comes across a curious tool called a Hollow Pen. This pen has the unique ability to open portals to the past wherever its wielder draws them. With it in hand, Ethan must tread through an increasingly intricate set of circumstances, altering elements of the past when necessary to influence corresponding changes in the future.
This is the premise of Time Hollow, a new (and somewhat low-profile) story-driven point-and-tap adventure game from Konami. I spent around twenty minutes with it on the show floor and, while it’s hard to judge such a time-intensive and complicated game within less than a half an hour’s time, it seems to be shaping up to be quite the competent storybook experience. Popular Japanese writers Junko Kawano and Takehiko Hata are responsible for much of the plot and character development. Professionally-designed animated FMV sequences are used to tell important parts of the storyline, and the various scenes are scrollable by dragging the stylus across the screen (or using the D-pad), adding to the immersion and allowing for more than a mere screen’s worth of atmosphere. The graphical presentation is made more impressive as well through the use of parallax scrolling, which moves different parts of the background at different rates when the screen scrolls.
Of course, you still walk about in the same manner as any other point-and-click adventure, meaning you choose your direction, tap, and then let Ethan make his way there as the screen switches. You examine objects and interact with people by simply tapping on them, of course. It really works quite well, and it’s surprising that more games of this type have not yet been released for the Nintendo DS.
The portion of the game we played was very near the beginning; we visited one of just a couple of explorable areas in the demo (a school named Chronos, depicted on a scrollable world map), where we spoke to a girl about an experience she had yesterday regarding a conflict. It was our mission to piece together the details of what, when, where, and who, and after each fragment of information had been collected, we were then able to visit the location of the original event and draw our portal to the past.
The finished game will feature 8 different days, with each day serving as a chapter for a bigger, overarching story. Throughout the experience it seems like you will encounter a very heavy amount of dialogue, something that probably isn’t too surprising to anyone familiar with the genre. You’ll also have to answer questions by choosing the correct choices; all of these things will directly affect your success in restoring the future that was meant to be for Ethan.
I’m not quite sure what to make of Time Hollow yet, but I’d hardly judge it based on the very limited time I received with it at the show. If you’re a fan of the point-and-click mystery/storybook adventure genre, Time Hollow definitely has a team behind it sporting the necessary credentials to produce a gripping quest. While there’s no guarantee it’ll help you to prevent spontaneous family disappearances due to temporal distortions, at least it’ll entertain you. Keep watching DigitalChumps for more coverage in the very near future; the game is set to release this fall, which is right around the corner.
