I first heard about and played a preview build of Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today (totally abbreviating that as DS:TCT going forward) in early February. In the hour or so I played, the art style was interesting and the story seemed promising. The preview build did not have voice-acting included, so the characters felt a little hollow, but I could see it had promise.
Fast forward to mid-April and the game was released to the masses on Steam and GOG. One of the first things I noticed, obviously, was the inclusion of the character voiceovers, but it was more than just a passing ‘oh, that’s cool.’ I was actually really impressed with the quality of the voiceovers which gave the game such a better atmosphere and made the characters much more robust. I normally don’t lead off a review with talking about the voice-acting but my experience with DS:TCT provided a unique reason to, and moreover, the quality of these — and the script writing — are two of the best parts about the game.
In fact, looking back over my notes, the list of negatives/concerns I made are pretty brief, but they’re certainly, well, noteworthy. First, and this is something few point and click adventure games (if any) can claim to have avoided, there are some annoying puzzles. There are times, albeit rare, when you are stumped out of your mind and unclear on what you’re supposed to do next. The earliest point for me in this game was not realizing I could move off screen and to the left by the sentries posted at the camp. A little more of a indication that this area was accessible would have been all I needed to be able to advance, but I ended up looking at 123Pazu’s walkthrough about seven or eight individual, specific times for a hint throughout the seven hours it took to play through (and my thanks to him for the help!).
Not realizing I could go over to another part of the area was a one-off goof that is more on me than the game, but there are other times when you’re left scratching your head and re-treading areas and trying all items with all objects, etc. I’m not sure I have ever played a point and click where this did not happen at least two or three times, so I can’t fault Fictiorama Studios too much for this. But, what’s odd is that, very early in a game you meet a character named Hunter who plays a significant role. He tells you he can get you anything you need as he’s essentially the ‘boss’ around the camp you’re in. But, at times when you do need something simple, it’s not even an option to ask him for it, which seemed to break the narrative flow a bit.
There are a lot of other cases in which you can see and inspect something, and you know it’s important, but you can’t do anything with it yet. That’s also typical of about any point and click adventure, but I must say that I really liked how communicative the protagonist, Michael, was about these situations. For example, of him just saying something generic like “that won’t work” or “no,” you get feedback specific to what you’re doing, or, trying to do, or at least the vast majority of the time. It’s nice to get that because it’s a lot more useful and less asinine than generic ‘fail’ responses, and in some cases it gives you a subtle clue about what steps you need to take first before you do the specific action you’re attempting at that moment — which beats banging your head against the wall or looking at a walkthrough after being stuck for however long. Of note, most of the twenty-four Steam Achievements are based on trying these unusual combinations of things; I think I unlocked just ten of the twenty-four Achievements, but given that most are based on attempting strange combinations of items/objects, I suppose that’s a good thing?
Speaking of good things, I appreciated the speed at which this game moves at. By that I mean the load times are instant and it Alt+Tabs perfectly well. Navigating the whole game world is snappy things to most screens having a ‘quick exit’ icon that if you double click will instantly zip you to the next screen (the area I mentioned before that I got stuck on did not, however). It helps, in terms of getting around quickly, that the game world itself is actually pretty small. Maybe not for a $20 indie game (that still yields a solid seven hours of play I should mention again), but it’s not a massive adventure game in terms of number of locations. The game is split into four chapters, but all parts of all chapters remain important throughout the game in one form or another, but the sum of these parts is physically pretty small. It’s big enough that I did not feel claustrophobic and I still had several places to ‘check down’ when I was stuck, but it’s also not nearly so large that it became burdensome.
In closing, I have to touch on the ending of DS:TCT. It was quite a shock when the credit roll started as you feel like the story and the over-arching mystery just got blown wide open and you’re in for another major plot change. So in that regard, the game ends on a cliffhanger that I can only hope is being expanded about with a sequel (as far as I can tell this is not an episodic release). Yet, even if a sequel does not come about, I enjoyed playing through DS:TCT and can happily recommend it.
To the summary…
