What Never Was

released on Jan 11, 2019

What Never Was is a short, story-driven first-person game focused on exploration and puzzle-solving about Sarah, having to shoulder the arduous task of clearing out her grandfathers attic, and soon finds that not everything about the attic is what it seems.


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A short prologue to an upcoming project, it shows a lot of potential, with detailed environments, good voice acting and more than adequate puzzles that even comment on the player's wrong deductions, showing foresight on the developer's part.
It's a bit heavy on the pop culture references and the mouse controls require the veteran adventure player to rewire their brain to remember that here left click is examine and right click is interact (ahh my head!), but while nothing exceptional this will likely be a good game when more comes out.

Just fine, It's your regular puzzle experience.

has the charm of a nancy drew and i want more

This is a weird one to review because it's very clear that this is a bit of a demo for a larger idea that the developer wants to make in the future.
What we have here is a decent (albeit a bit cliched) premise of a young girl discovering the secrets of her grandfathers travels. It's a short slice of a larger puzzle game with simple mechanics that work fairly well for the 25 minute runtime. The voice acting is solid for such a small production, but I can't help but knock the fact that many lines very clearly sound like they were recorded at different times, with different levels of clarity and loudness throughout. The story is also pretty bare-bones, and I was hoping for more of a twist or exciting ending to really help this feel like it's own standalone adventure. But unfortunately that doesn't happen and it really does just feel like a mini demo for a potential larger project.
It's hard to rate this because it is being sold for a whopping FREE.99 but I can't say I'd recommend checking it out unless you were absurdly interested. It's a decent little tech demo but nothing about it is interesting enough to help it stand on it's own. Seeing that there is a longer version in the works however, I might think about keeping an eye out for that instead.

Very short, but it was interesting.