Stories on Tuesday - When the Past Was Around - Part 4 - The End

Hello and welcome to Stories on Tuesday. It's part 4, the final part, of playing When the Past Was Around from developers Mojiken Studio.

After getting stuck in Part 3, https://youtu.be/61wtpGQNsHQ, i looked online before playing this part to find the solution to opening the safe. turns out, what i assumed to be instructions on the blanket was kinda true but what i actually had to do was count each of them in that scene.

From then on, things went quite smooth. i still had my notes from the week before so i was able to quickly solve some puzzles that required the music notes and the shapes. i found the end of the game and the start of the game to be a more pleasant experience than the middle. the puzzle difficulty really swung from easy to hard. i would argue that this did have an impact on the story. At the end, when things were getting serious, it did feel thematically weird that we were having to do puzzles when all i wanted to do was progress the story.

I don't think the story is bad, i just feel like the choice of puzzles weren't always the best, or that the game didn't do well enough to telegraph what it expected of the player. But in a game with nothing to read and nothing is spoken, there's always an element of doubt as to whether or not the story i took away from this was the intended story. Either way, i am satisfied with the story, but because the puzzles in the middle were frustrating the overall experience could've been better.

Stories on Tuesday - When the Past Was Around - Part 3

Hello and welcome to Stories on Tuesday. It's part 3 of playing When the Past Was Around from developers Mojiken Studio.

After getting stuck in Part 2, https://youtu.be/BV3uaGfp1M8, i looked online before playing this part to find the solution to making the Pinwheel. i'm a little salty about it, it felt like a jump up in difficulty and that the game did a poor job of signalling what we were meant to do.

One question i had was where would the auto save put me. turns out, right at the start of the whole section. so i spent the first 10 minutes re-doing everything and then i got to solve the Pinwheel puzzle. i managed to get to the next story section and once again i have gotten stuck. so for Part 4, i will have looked up the solution. i can only hope i don't have to redo everything in that section again.

Stories on Tuesday - When the Past Was Around - Part 2

Hello and welcome to Stories on Tuesday. It's part 2 of playing When the Past Was Around from developers Mojiken Studio.

Unfortunately, not much progress is made in this video. in Part 1, https://youtu.be/BAntYXUdGY0, we had a couple of instances where i was stuck for a little while, but here in Part 2 i got stuck for maybe 20-30 minutes! I got stuck on the Pinwheel puzzle so this video is mostly me trying to work it out and failing.

Stories on Tuesday - When the Past Was Around - Part 1

*Apologies for all the noise in the background. it's been a very windy and rainy day here in Japan. i did try waiting a few hours before recording, but the weather never improved so i had to start. Even now, around 4 hours later, it's still rough outside. The noise is from my audio, so over on Ko-Fi from tomorrow there'll be a version that's just game audio.

Hello and welcome to Stories on Tuesday. we have a new game and it's When the Past Was Around. I'm playing this on PS4.

I'm not a big fan of point and click adventure games so once i saw the pointer appear on the screen i was a little concerned. i often find the game logic is different to my own logic and it can be frustrating trying to work out what the game wants me to do, when all i want is story.

Thankfully in this part, there was only once where i was truly stuck but there were a couple of times i needed to think about things. I think we're about half way through the story so maybe next week's part 2 is all i need to finish the game.

So far, the story telling has been done with no audio commentary from anyone in the game. it's been told via pictures, sometimes moving, on the screen. i don't mind this approach too much, but it does mean how i interpret the story and what the game's story actually is could be different. I'm hoping that by the end of the game i'll get a complete picture. but at the moment, i don't think i'm quite grasping the story they're trying to tell.