[Review] The Almost Gone

[R e i]

 

The Almost Gone  Game Informations
Developer: Happy Volcano
Publisher: PlayDigious
Released: June 25, 2020
MSRP: $6.99 ($14.99 PC/Switch)

 

 

The Almost Gone is an expeditious experience. Its five chapters will only take between one to two hours to complete, depending on your puzzle-solving skills. The narrative takes you through a few locations from the past and present of the protagonist's family history as you attempt to figure out exactly what is going on and what has led to where you are now. It isn't an exposition-heavy experience, so expect to fill in a few of the blanks yourself with a little bit of common sense.As you explore the world, you need to piece together the clues you find, whether it’s matching constellations to a globe in your room, matching symbols found in notes to a physical in-game puzzle, or finding hidden numbers and patterns to unlock the next area. I resorted to jotting down notes on a scrap of paper to keep track of everything, but for the more mathematically inclined, I’m sure you won’t need to do this. What intrigued 
The areas you explore are broken down into rooms that usually form a square, whether it’s four adjoining rooms, or nine with one at the centre. I say usually, as certain rooms have areas protruding from the typical layout, such as in Act Four, where an MRI scanner that takes you through to an adjacent section or a broken window takes you to the wards of the hospital. What would’ve been useful is a mini-map of sorts, showcasing the general layout, as 
The game also explores the past through the introduction of a time travel mechanic. Delving into your father’s childhood, this was the darkest part of the game for me, especially as you uncover disturbing imagery and find out about the suffering your grandfather endured in his later years, as his work 

Common sense is also what you'll need to solve the various puzzles this game holds. It's an interesting set-up. You're able to explore a corner or section of a room at a time. Swiping below the room section, which only takes up a small portion of the screen, allows you to view it from four different angles to get a clearer look at everything inside. Swipe the room itself and you'll move to an adjacent area.The narrative voice is that of a teenage girl, resulting in several blunt and apathetic comments that brought a smile to my face, despite the subject matter. The one that caught me the most was, “Grandpa might have been an awful man, but he did read.” Her sarcastic nature contrasts with the atmosphere, breathing lightness into what could have been a very dark and unforgiving story. All of this tragedy is accompanied by a fantastic score. 

 

 

The puzzles don't linger as well. Nothing here is going to break your brain or require extensive notes. Most are pretty basic with a few requiring trial and error, though it asks you early on to memorize and recognize constellations. This is about as difficult as the puzzles get. The artwork of each room and object is top-notch, reminding me of the clean lines and angles of Monument Valley. There is a recurring surreal quality to the visuals and the way the world is broken up. Finding your way around a room will make immediate sense, but as you progress onto streets and into hospitals, you'll have to pay attention, or you'll lose your bearings. It's an effective and striking tool for the developers but one that never sees its full potential. Even in its deepest and most miserable moments, the experience remains fleeting.The art and the puzzles of The Almost Gone are fine on their own, but what brings this package together is its music. Composer and sound designer Yves De Mey has arranged an outstanding audial experience that managed to put a little fear into me the further I progressed into this family's history. I was on my toes for the entirety of the fourth chapter as De May's music took what I was 
Like many recent indie games, The Almost Gone isn't afraid to tackle difficult subject matter. And like a lot of its fellow developers, Happy Volcano opts not to get too far into the weeds of the topics it covers. Certainly, there will be players who take the narrative to heart more passionately than I did, but I do find it a curious enough of an experience to recommend to mobile gamers looking for something more melancholy than the newest match-3 puzzler.As your explore your house, your neighbourhood and your childhood, you find a haunting, minimalist world that seems more and more detached from reality the deeper you explore. The clean lines of the imagery juxtapose the dark contents of the world you have to navigate. The Almost Gone isn’t afraid to explore subjects such as alcoholism, divorce, institutionalisation and shattered dreams, but while such subject matter can be difficult for some, I didn’t 
The story is broken up into five chapters, each with its own distinctive set – your house, the suburb you grew up in, your grandparents’ house, a psychiatric hospital, a forest. To progress, you explore dioramas, spinning them around and using simple point-and-click gameplay to puzzle and piece together what 
I would have loved the ability to zoom into the isometric view of each area, to allow for better exploration; the world only occupies about a third. 

 

 

Apuzzle-box game along the lines of Monument Valley or The Room, The Almost Gone has you poking and prodding at beautiful miniature dioramas of homes and neighbourhoods to uncover the story of the family who lived there. Set in a liminal space between life and death, it is a surreal few hours of 
Its clean architectural lines and calm palette contrast with the dreamlike (or nightmarish) puzzle logic: on inserting a wedding tape into a VHS player, the TV blows out in a snowstorm to reveal a wedding cake behind the screen; thick tree roots and black tendrils snake through otherwise pristine living spaces; an apartment is full of scale models of buildings, creating an unsettling Escher-esque feel.I did once have to resort to a developer walkthrough to find out what to do with a laser pointer, but otherwise I moved unimpeded through these puzzles, absorbed in the pleasurable busywork of rotating and scanning rooms for clues and objects of interest: a number scrawled behind a painting, a poster of constellations, something hidden inside an innocuous trinket. The puzzle design is impressively disciplined, with no red herrings to throw you off. Once you’ve found something interesting in a scene, it’s picked out and highlighted like a Fritz Kahn illustration, saving you from poring over the same dioramas for ages in search of a way forward.The storytelling, however, is less focused. The Almost Gone touches on addiction, abuse, neglect, murder and more, all in less than three hours’ play. It’s a bit much, and in combination with slightly imperfect translation and an opaque ending, it means the narrative is less satisfying than the puzzle-solving. Some chapters play out better than others, but a more intimate tale might have worked better here. I’m reminded of The Gardens Between, a similar puzzle game, whose straightforwardly touching tale of separated childhood friends lands better than this tangle of more sinister plot threads. The Almost Gone draws you in with a sinister family mystery, but its aesthetic beauty and strange, succinct puzzles end up carrying it.To leave the first scene in the bedroom, you have to solve a small puzzle. Then you go on to explore the rest of the house, with more doors opening as you solve more puzzles related to memories of the narrating entity. For example, finding the correct patterns hinted at in the environment, then clicking them on an object, which then opens and gives you a key to the next area. The puzzles are almost exclusively environmental: turning valves, finding and objects, looking for hints in your surroundings.

 

The Almost Gone system requirements

Minimum Requirements
OS: Win 7 64
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 2.0GHz / AMD Athlon II X2 280
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7470 or NVIDIA GeForce GT 710
System Memory: 2 GB RAM
Storage: 500 MB Hard drive space
Recommended Requirements
OS: Win 10 64
Processor: Intel Core i3-2100 3.1GHz / AMD Phenom II X4 910e
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7470 or NVIDIA GeForce GT 710
System Memory: 4 GB RAM
Storage: 500 MB Hard drive space