It is impossible to get your head around memory. It’s intangible, yet all-powerful. It can be like living with a ghost, but the ghost is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
If I was making a game about my own memories, my own experience of interacting with memory, I am confident that it would be the worst game ever made. An open-world affair, but an endlessly glitchy one. Landmarks disappear and shift. The same journey can take hours one day and seconds the next, and when you reach the destination it’s entirely different anyway. And wherever you go, you’re always at the centre of the map. I do not want to play this game.
Hindsight reviewDeveloper: Team HindsightPublisher: Annapurna InteractivePlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Releases 4th August on PC (Steam), Switch and iOS
But what about a game exploring someone else’s memories? What form would that take? What problems might it run into? Hindsight is an attempt to answer the first question, I think, and it also provides plenty of answers to the second.
Hindsight is the story of a woman returning to the family home once her mother has died. She packs her mother’s things, moving room to room, and then she leaves. That’s one story. The other, deeper story is of the brisk thermals of memory she rides as she moves through the house: the distant past hypertexts itself into view, simple paths are suddenly blocked, time curves, then loops, then spirals.
It’s pure montage – a series of dioramas delivered in flat colour and with simple 3D models, the whole thing carefully blanched of texture and too much in the way of specificity. The form this montage takes, though, is more complex. I would say that Hindsight deals in turns, ghosts and windows.