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.
