Hindsight Review friv game - A Short Journey Through Memories

Hindsight is an interactive novel published by Friv2Online Studio under Annapurna Interactive. Very simple and fleeting, the game has a couple of aces up its sleeve with which it can hook the receptive gamer. More details - we tell in the review.

Hindsight's story centers around a woman who arrives at her parents' home after her mother's funeral. Collecting things, the heroine plunges into memories associated with growing up, parents, pleasant and not so events. From birth to the current moment, the game shows a retrospective look at the past years, answering many questions that the protagonist asks herself.

In the present, a woman moves from room to room, packs boxes, and puts her most expensive items in a separate suitcase - to take with her as a keepsake. Each thing becomes a trigger for one or another mental journey into the past, and thinking out loud, the daughter speaks out the problems that remain unresolved, in order to eventually look at her life through the eyes of her mother and come to unexpected conclusions.

Hindsight speaks to the friv gamer in an adult language, and can awaken his own memories - after all, all families are the same in their own way. Someone will remember a fun family trip, and someone will remember an important performance that a parent did not attend. Someone will reach out to revise old photographs, and someone will plunge into melancholy, dreaming about the unfulfilled. Such is the game - it can pull out not only positive scenes.

At the same time, it is difficult to call Hindsight a game. This is an interactive novel where you only have to twirl the sticks and press one button, nothing more. Although the only mechanic that the developers came up with looks fresh.

Each scene here is static: in fact, you are viewing a series of dioramas with memories frozen in them. To move on to the next one, you need to rotate the camera, find the active point and “hook” on it, after which you will be pulled into a new scene.

This point can be anyone or anything - a character, a book, a bag, a tire swing, a starry sky, and so on. It is impossible to predict where you will go next time, which makes the story even more interesting. This randomness probably reflects the inconsistency of the main character's thoughts: remember how memories are sometimes confused, returning to one or another episode of the past, and you will understand what it is about.

I will deceive you if I say that the gameplay of Hindsight consists only of such movements. No, here occasionally you can still perform primitive actions - so primitive that it makes no sense to mention them. For example, you will click the gamepad button several times while the heroine is cutting carrots in the kitchen, or you will connect raindrops on the glass to open the way to a new memory.

So why is the friv game worth playing through to the end then? It's all about the competent construction of the script and short duration. The narrative is divided into episodes, each of which highlights an important episode in the life of the protagonist, she tells a classic story about the problems of relationships between parents and children, and therefore catchy. Not so much that you will be able to watch the action with bated breath, but enough that you will want to wait for the end credits, and not turn off the friv game. And there are really emotional scenes here, from which no, no, yes, the heart skips a beat.

That is why I want to recommend Hindsight - but only if you accept the almost complete lack of gameplay mechanics in the game.