Reviews from

in the past


Compared to Cing's later works in Hotel Dusk and Last Window, Trace Memory feels more like a rough tech demo for the DS... but what a charming little tech demo it is! You play as Ashley Mizuki Robbins, the daughter of two scientists who were presumed dead years ago, only for Ashley's father to send her a letter years later asking her to come to Blood Edward Island to learn the truth. Accompanying her is a device named the Dual Trace System (DTS), which very much resembles the classic DS model and can read DS game cards data cards scattered around the island of her father's logs. She eventually bumps into the ghost of a boy named "D", who also doesn't remember a thing of his past, and together, Ashley and D must navigate the abandoned island's sprawling mansion to unravel the mysteries of their respective pasts.

Puzzles are a bit of a mixed bag admittingly. A few of them are a bit rough around the edges; during multiple parts of the game, I had trouble grabbing or contacting objects on the screen with my stylus due to really imprecise or tiny hitboxes. In addition, a good chunk of the puzzles are extremely simple: some are tap and drag puzzles like breaking a bottle or rotating a crank, and a few are just inventory puzzle chains (item A will get you item B which is used to obtain item C). Nevertheless, I do have to respect the ambition for certain sequences. The DTS also comes with an in-game camera to take pictures of scenery so you don't necessarily need a pencil and paper alongside you while playing, but there's also a nice overlay feature that lets you place images on top of another image made transparent to decode hidden passwords; it's a nice little gimmick that I wish was utilized a bit more. I also have to give Trace Memory credit for utilizing practically every feature of the DS, with a couple of microphone puzzles and another DS open-shut puzzle that I think is basically Cing's speciality considering I have yet to see any other developer tinker with that idea. Outside of these interactive puzzles however, I do wish that the inventory puzzles were a bit more facilitated: key items have to be obtained from tapping around observable scenes that appear to have a lot of distinct items of interest, but upon tapping in many of these areas, most end up as red herrings that only provide a single line of flavor text. I also admit that as short as the game is (five hours, about half the length of Hotel Dusk), it was a bit easy to get lost within the mansion since I wasn't provided with a map but often had to backtrack to previously explored locations in past chapters for key items that became obtainable once I passed the right checks in future chapters.

Trace Memory's doesn't quite achieve the same feeling of presence as what I'd come to expect for Cing, with its strange mouth animations upon still-figures (as opposed to Hotel Dusk's distinct inky animated character models) or its fairly contrived puzzles that seem to make little sense in the context of its narrative (as per most tech demos), but I do think its heart is in the right place. Despite how much flavor text I had to mash through just tapping everywhere, picking up on those little details to add to D's past or stumbling upon another data card kept me engrossed in the central mysteries for tighter world-building. While I do prefer the first-person 3D environments of Hotel Dusk as opposed to the top-down exploration of Trace Memory, I have to concur with MelMellon that the ability to highlight more specific areas of interest in 2D while displaying its more vast environments in 3D grants Trace Memory a combination of detail and immersion that few games manage to achieve. Finally, even if the central narrative isn't quite as intricate or intimate as Cing's future work, the game wrapped itself up quite nicely with no plot holes (and keeps you aware of the running plotline with its end-of-chapter summary quizzes, much like Hotel Dusk would later utilize), and the final reveal of D's fate as a reward for thoroughly exploring the mansion and unlocking all his memories made the whole experience worthwhile. I came in expecting a short cozy adventure game highlighting both the potential of the DS and Cing's early ambitions, and I got just that, so all in all, I'd say it was a pretty good day.

Cing out here in 2005 saying "hey what if we use every single fucking feature of the DS, especially the parts you don't know about" and we rewarded them with bankruptcy. Super unfair.

-dude it’s so wild how edgy things could be in the mid 00s in a way that didn’t seem tasteless or needlessly provocative but instead was just edgy to further the plot n characters. like I think this was rated teen but there’s some v dark themes here that I wasn’t expecting for a game that looks and feels so childlike on the ds.
-love ds 3d graphics sm, chunky and blocky little polygons. flower sun and rain, style savvy and this are all very fucking cute and unmatched in terms of aesthetic. running around on this cute little beachy island that’s like totally abandoned and the dusty af mansion, the caves at the end w the blocky trees hanging over the characters. also just rlly love the designs for all these characters and rlly enjoyed seeing beautiful 2d drawings of the characters turned into blocky chibified rough caricatures.
-tbh when this comes out on switch I will probably pick it up bc I don’t know if my broke bitch laptop can play wii games well (I think it can but idk) but I also don’t know if I’ll replay this unless it’s majorly diff in terms of the story. like they rlly could’ve either cut out a lot of fat/backtracking or made this a lot longer adding in lots of characterization and motivation for the characters, but instead it’s a weird middle length for a game where by the end I was kinda idk bored??? idk I think the switch vers. looks rlly cute, love how switch games look for the most part.
-the two blonde dudes are kinda yaoi idkkkkk…
-the story is soooo cute, mostly why I wanted to play this even though I barely knew anything about the story I just always thought ashley’s design was so slay. but yeah def connected w this and w ashley and her search for family she doesn’t even rlly know if they want her around or who they are. it’s why shattered memories is one of my fave stories the more I think about, this isn’t totally comparable and not nearly as good for a variety of reasons but I still found ashley’s relationship w her dad rlly cute and sweet. also liked all the parallels between her and d and how so many adolescents feel like lost and lonely and invisible. heavy important stuff for what is basically a kids game, wish I played as a kid but tbh I was a dumb kid and would’ve gotten stuck on puzzles early on especially if played before I had iphone.

This game... kind of actually rules? Or, at the very least, I'm an absolute sucker for stories that reveal mysteries in two different times. The slow reveal of what happened to Ashley's mother and what happened to D's father was fun to work through and carried me through most of the game. Otherwise, the game is a pretty solid adventure game. The puzzles are never too easy or too obnoxious (aside from a few that required tedious backtracking). And it even makes good use of some of the DS's mechanics with the folding screen, built-in mic, and touchscreen, which is another thing that I'm a sucker for games doing. It almost feels like this game was crafted specifically for me.

now that the remake for this and the sequel is out and looks to have shifted more than i expected i decided to go back and replay this (and will play the Wii version of Another Code R) before getting around to the new ones at a later date.

this is about how i remembered it. solid art style, decent music, impressive (but simplistic) use of nearly every feature the DS has to offer. it would be more noteworthy if nearly every facet wasn't improved on massively with Cing's following work with the Kyle Hyde saga.

was less enthused with somehow ending up with the bad ending even though i had investigated and interacted with what i thought was nearly everything in the game up until then. finished that run and followed up with a quicker one today to get the good ending. this has a starred save NG+ system similar to Hotel Dusk so i'll probably be back in the near future to see what changes in a second run on one file.


"Sometimes the closer you are to someone....the more it hurts."

If anything, the DS library is filled with unique bite-sized experiences to whet the palette for someone such as myself. Trace Memory is a point-and-click adventure game that follows a young girl named Ashley Robbins. Her goal is simple enough to follow. She is looking into a mystery revolved around her missing parents and hopes to find clarity on the island where the game takes place. Through exploration, and a number of environmental puzzles solved through inventory management you will progress steadily towards the conclusion. It is a short, yet charming time that gets most of its strongest value out of the protagonist herself. The puzzles are satisfying enough to itch your brain, and the mystery itself has some fun turns, but Ashley is the best thing it has going for it. She is sassy, smart, inquisitive, and most importantly relatable. A far too common fallacy with many writers is squandering their character potential because they just don't understand the person they are trying to create. This is what makes Ashley so fantastically engaging, and by far the heart of not only this game but the sequel. There aren't a lot of other characters present, and with a short run time, if you don't nail what you put on the table, well it is going to stand out terribly. Ashley brings the most worthwhile content present, and she would be my number one reason to recommend this to any newcomers. Oh, and the puzzles are fun enough with the DS gimmicks as well if that matters to you at all.

We hereby award: The Bronze Seal of Recognition

A game that feels really mature in its themes and tackles them with a lot of thoughtfulness and sincerity. A lot of these puzzles are somewhat standard “use thing on other thing” affair for an adventure game like this, but a few of them use the DS in SUCH a cool and creative way (if you’ve played the game you know the ones I’m talking about), and it felt really rewarding uncovering the game’s mysteries bit by bit through figuring them out. I like how it balances character interactions with its plot, I think the stuff with discovering D’s past being optional to the ending actually adds a lot of pathos to that side of the story in the way only an interactive medium can achieve, makes it feel less like an artificial “video game-y” completion necessity and more like genuinely going out of your way to be helpful and kind to a friend.

Also it takes place on my birthday and me and Ashley share a birthday! That was a fun surprise haha

Another Code is a slower, moodier, puzzle point-and-click game on the Nintendo DS that I failed to notice upon release, being fixated on the console’s faster and brighter JRPGs at the time. I probably would not have appreciated the thought that went into the story upon release as much as I do now.

The player takes control of the young teen Ashley, as she searches the abandoned mansion of “Blood Edward Island” for her absent researcher father, and the answers to her mother’s death. The secondary story thread is the events that lead to the death of the island’s amnesiac ghost, “D”.

The game controls as expected; the touch screen is used to drag Ashley about the 3D environments, but you can also use the D-pad. The use of the dual screens of the DS come into play at points, as does the console’s ability to fold in on itself, and the use of the mic. I thought that the the puzzles that utilised the in-game ‘camera feature’ were unique and fun.

In regards to the art direction, the Japanese sensibilities are present in character portraits, and they look good. The environments are all well-rendered and atmospheric. I had no trouble navigating the game’s setting and finding the necessary items and puzzles to progress the game’s plot.

As far as narrative goes, I was more invested in uncovering the events that lead to D’s death, the Edward’s family trauma, and the subsequent abandonment of the Edward’s family home than I was invested in finding Ashley’s father. Overall, I feel that the darker themes of the narrative were overly simplified at times, perhaps to the ‘benefit’ of the intended child audience. I think the story could have avoided so much of the dace around death it commits to, without upsetting, or confusing the child audience that would actively seek out this type of mystery and puzzle-solving game in the first place.

It’s important to note that it is possible to complete the game without uncovering all clues to D’s death, and thus to end the game with a somewhat unsatisfactory feeling, lacking full closure. Though the game’s so short that you can complete it within a few hours!

As a first outing on the DS for Cing, it’s a good mystery adventure game for kids (and adults) that’s still worth playing if you enjoy a darker atmosphere and mystery elements in puzzle point-and-click games.

This review contains spoilers

Really cool first attempt at a puzzle-VN style game for the DS. The game feels more like a tech demo for what would become Hotel Dusk, especially in how the narrative is very shallow compared to future Cing games and how the mansion is just a long hallway with puzzles in it. Did the Edward family had to solve 30 puzzles to go to their garden? Or maybe Bill had put them to trap Richard?

These issues can be easily ignored, especially considering how early it released. What annoys me the most is actually the writing, the amount of repetition and meaningless talking is too high, which combined with the game's short run shows how little meat this story has. It surprises me that the same writers did Hotel Dusk and Last Window, which have way more deep dialogue and inner monologues.

Another Code still hits the nostalgia for that era for me and it really tries to take advantage of the console's quirks, which I appreciated a lot. Also really good art and soundtrack.

A very quaint and sweet game about memory and loneliness. Ashley is a very good protagonist, and her relationship with D as well as his own struggles are very nice and authentic. They really do just feel like two lonely kids finding solidarity in one another, becoming fast friends as children tend to do. The gameplay and puzzles are fun, and the atmosphere is off the charts. The ending is sort of insane in a way that I really, really appreciate, as are the two mysteries regarding each kid respectively that slowly unravel throughout the course of the story. Here’s your warning to be VERY thorough in your investigating or else you’ll miss out on the true ending and feel horrible about it.

The story was decent but I expected a lot more from the puzzles. The side plot was way more interesting though I doubt it makes it into the sequel. Don't really feel like playing it if it will just be the same quality but x3 as long.

The writing's severely bloated, and there's this awful mechanic where half the time you can only pick up usable items after you've already found what they interact with. "Luke," you might ask, "aren't the writing and item puzzles the two things that need to be good in a point-and-click adventure? Why did you like this game if those weren't up to par?" Well, hypothetical reader, it's because I'm a sucker for the DSthetic, and this is the most quintessentially "Nintendo DS" game I've played in forever! It's short, easy, laid-back, largely family-friendly, and uses quite literally every single hardware gimmick the original DS shipped with. (Seriously, if you get stuck on a puzzle, odds are you can solve it by asking yourself "which frivolous console features haven't been used yet?" It worked twice for me!) It's the sort of game that could easily have been a formative piece of media for me if I'd encountered it 15 years ago, and one I can see myself replaying whenever I need to de-stress and just sit down with a game that isn't too demanding. Especially since I'm pretty sure I got the bad ending this time around.

It can be difficult to get the good ending on a first playthrough, but Trace Memory is a perfect first adventure game/VN to get you into the gaming styles. Unfortunately, you will then want to play worse adventure games/VNs, like this one's sequel.

Some of the more standard adventure game stuff is kind of annoying, with a lot of instances of backtracking and having to examine specific items to trigger other events or dialogue so I ended up keeping a walkthrough open the whole time. The handful of puzzles that utilize the DS physically beyond tapping and the compelling story and characters made it more than worth experiencing though.

I don’t know if I would describe myself as a FAN of the long-running CW monster hunting show Supernatural, but I DID watch roughly nine or ten seasons of it, MOSTLY because I had friends who were super into it and I liked to hang out in their Supernatural-themed discord. I hope they’re all doing well. I think about them a lot. If you haven’t seen the show, it’s about these two guys, younger brother Sam and older brother Dean Winchester, whose mother was killed by a demon when Dean was a little kid and Sam was but a wee babe, which set their dad down the path of Self-Destructive Monster Hunting and he dragged his baby boys into that life with him. The dynamic in the early show is that after their dad goes missing, Dean, who has always enjoyed The Life, drags Sam back after he had successfully gotten out, and now they drive around mostly the rural American Midwest and every week they stop in a place where something mysterious has happened and then kill a ghost or a werewolf or something. Over the course of the first five season the show finds its groove, s a story arc emerges and is cleanly resolved, everyone likes it, and then the show very divisively continues for eleven more years. This is, I think, the simplest way I can lay this out. I will not get into the nuances of Supernatural fandom that’s not what we’re here for we all know how deep that well is I’m not gonna crawl out of it today, but I will say I think it is GENERALLY AGREED UPON that the middle years of the show are seen as the weakest, where we’re kind of treading water every year between our clearly defined apocalyptic early arc and the inklings of ending of the latter seasons. BUT there were always one or two really good episodes hidden in those really rough middle seasons that I eventually quit watching the show in the middle of, even for a show I didn’t like all THAT much at its best.

One episode in season nine, or maybe ten, I dunno, involved Dean getting a call from a boy’s home he spent time at as a teen about some ghost or something idk and they have to go banish it or whatever. And Sam is like wait when were you ever at a boy’s home and Dean says “OH YEAH I had completely forgotten that you didn’t know about this.” So the truth was that one summer when dean was like sixteen and Sam was like ten or whatever, their dad left them to go do a hunt somewhere, and Dean lost all their money OR SOMETHING (these details don’t matter to this story I promise) and then got caught trying to shoplift food for them, and opted to go to a like, Boy’s Reform School for a few weeks rather than juvie, because as far as anyone could tell he was like, a destitute teenager with no dad, because his dad sucks shit dude.

So when this all got sorted out his dad concocted this story that Dean was also away on a hunt or something to spare Sam’s feelings I guess? This is important, they never really get into why their dad didn’t want Sam to know, exactly. We can probably make a good guess, but we don’t know because he didn’t tell anybody. Sam learns this and he’s like, y’know 30 now or whatever so he doesn’t really care but as they’re leaving he does stop Dean and say “hey, why didn’t you ever tell me this?” and Dean just kind of shrugs and says “I dunno. Dad told me not to, and then the story became the story. I was sixteen.” And that’s all he has to say about it, and that’s all he really CAN say about it, but it’s also all he has to say about it. I don’t know if, at the end of the day, I would call Supernatural a great show, worth the sum of its many, many parts, but I do think it does some things really well, and one thing it almost always nailed was the way people can be just absolutely twisted up by people they love and look up to, the way familial authority wields this incredible power and how harmful that can be when we’re careless with it. That one line from Dean says a lot with a little, and a lot of better written shows wish they could convey the complexity that this one did I think maybe by accident here. I would stop watching SPN pretty soon after this episode, I think, but I think about this moment a lot, and I was thinking about it a lot particularly when I was playing Another Code: Two Memories, a game that is also deeply concerned with the mutability of memory, the way time blends and blurs and confuses us, and how easy it is to take advantage of the people who want to love and trust us.

Ashley Mizuki Robins and her aunt Jessica, who raised her since her dad dropped Ashley off at the age of three mere days after her mother’s MYSTERIOUS MURDER, arrive at BLOOD EDWARD ISLAND on the eve of Ashley’s fourteenth birthday after receiving a mysterious communication from her dad informing them of his whereabouts. This all comes as something of a shock to Ashley because she had been under the impression that he was dead this whole time, and is understandably pissed that Jessica has been keeping the truth from her for her entire life just because her dad asked her to and things seemed vaguely dangerous at the time. When they arrive at the island Ashley’s father, Richard, is not present at the docks where he said he’d be, and Jessica immediately disappears frighteningly, leaving behind only a scream and her glasses, so now Ashley has to search the island which is primarily comprised of the grounds of an enormous mansion complex (once owned by the wealthy Edwards family, now fallen to disrepair since they all mysteriously died or disappeared in the 1950s, earning the island its BLOOD epithet) for both of her missing relations. Before she can really get started she meets the ghost (!) of a mysterious boy who goes by D, because he thinks maybe his name started with the letter, but he just can’t remember! And soon they’re teaming up to explore the mansion and achieve their goals, Ashley to find her family, and D to recover his memories in hopes of getting closure and moving on from this world.

It's not a subtle plot, but it’s a strong hook, and that willingness to forgo an attempt at tact does lead to an incredible thematic tightness. Every single bit of this game traces back to the core themes of the reliability and importance of memory and the precarious strength of familial bonds. As they make their way through this goofy resident evil puzzle mansion, they don’t just uncover the tragedy of D’s death and his father’s, but also the greater tragedy of his family in generations both past and future, a bloodline simply haunted by an inability to make it work, thwarted from being good to each other by disease, by war, by stubbornness, always on the verge of doing right by each other until the choice is taken from them at the last moment and everyone suffers for it, but always the least deserving get it the worst.

In the present, Ashley’s parents were scientists working on some sort of government research into human memories, and it becomes clear over the course of the game that not only did this involve a machine capable of reading memories and eventually creating false ones, but that her mother’s murder was directly tied to it. Ashley was the only witness to the murder, supposedly, a memory she has deeply suppressed, and throughout the game as she digs into D’s past and her father’s work she begins to remember what happened that night, bit by bit, maybe.

Because this is the thing, right? She was three years old when this happened. Even if she hadn’t actively punched this traumatic memory down, time erodes that stuff, inevitably, always. AND everyone in her family, everyone she talks to in this game, is lying to her, or has lied to her about her entire history. Even Jessica, her de facto parent whom she loves unconditionally and whose safety is the primary driving call to action for the first half of the game, is untrustworthy. It’s a lonely place to be, and the only real way to find comfort is via D, an entirely external non-participant in this drama. These kids occupy this kind of gently supportive niche for each other, unable to truly do anything but Be There, which is the best thing they can do anyway. So as her memory starts to unravel into something maybe coherent, and maybe revelatory, and the events of the game become a lot more intimate to Ashley’s family history than she was expecting, the question becomes whether she really wants to know. D asserts that knowing is always better, and y’know, he’s been Not Knowing his own shit for something like 60 years by his own estimation, so he says this with conviction, but Ashley’s version of knowing is suspect at best. It’s a complicated question and I think the game is admirable for letting characters’ anxiety inform the tone of the work almost right up through to the end of the thing even though the actual mysteries of What Happened in both timelines have answers that are EXTREMELY obvious as soon as you have enough pieces to put a picture together.

Because the truth, as far as Another Code is concerned, is that D is right, of course, and you want to hold onto this shit. Ashley may be shaky on her distant past but she wants to hold onto the present. Even the gruff, “I don’t want to hear about it but also I am a wise man in my simplicity here’s some candy” boat captain who takes her to the island at the beginning of the game knows that we hold onto the stuff that matters to us, if we can. Throughout the game, at the chapter breaks, you go through little recap sections where Ashley prompts you with questions about all the stuff you just did to help you keep the mysteries straight in two timelines, but it’s framed as her repeating these things because she doesn’t want to forget again. These things are important to her. The deeper things go in this plot the less certainty there is to be found, and even when concrete answers reveal themselves to both characters at the end, the lesson Ashley takes away isn’t that the answers were there all along; she thinks to herself “I am holding dad’s hand in mine. My grip is tight. His hand is warm.” She’s happy to have found her answers but most of all she wants to remember the feeling. The thing that was missing or lost from both protagonists across a century. It got me pretty good.

I guess I’ll talk about the play of this game? Because in some ways it is the most incongruous thing. This game came out in 2005, and you can tell it was one of those early DS Every Part Of The System Gee Whiz sort of games but this is true of Another Code to a comical degree. You’re not JUST blowing into the microphone, you’re not JUST closing the clam shell to solve puzzles, it’s like, pulling system information from your DS profile to generate Ashley’s in-game birthday, it’s incredible.

It’s hard to be certain how much this game is intended to be like, For Kids, with that in mind. MAYBE it’s so straightforward and easy because of the novelty of the features, but there is certainly a very light touch to the puzzles in general once you get past the unique control scheme. The game also talks around a lot of its DARKEST stuff but it’s still a bloody, emotionally intense affair, enough to earn a T rating in America. I always wanted to play this game as a kid, enraptured by a trailer for it on a Nintendo Power preview disc that I borrowed from a friend, and I think I could handle the content, but I don’t know how much I would have had patience for the double mystery, the past stuff, maybe the degree to which the heavy stuff is implied vs shown would have made it go over my head a bit. It’s hard to say. I think we often don’t give kids credit for what they can handle. It’s so hard to inhabit the headspace of a kid. Memory erodes, right? That’s just time, bay bee.

Hey if anyone wants to mail me a European wii and this game’s sequel uhhhhhhh hit me up my laptop can’t handle emulating lol

A heartfelt adventure with the budget of five water bottles.

So this game is about the journey of finding what really happened to our dad.

While I enjoyed the adventure, story wise game felt like a lore dump rather than full on personal story for me? What I mean is majority of the story is about Edward family's past rather than the main character Ashley.

I mean dad story comes back but it's just at the end of it and ends so fast with just only a small connection to the overall plot, also villain's story feels really abruptly ended as well. So that makes me wonder if it was rushed?

Now I maybe look like not enjoyed the story but like I said I enjoyed the adventure especially because of our companion D the Ghost. Their back and forward argues was entertaining enough to make the adventure more enjoyable for me.

But still in my opinion last chapter felt like rushed to me. So because of that story is kinda meh for me. In my opinion game must had at least one more chapter to flesh out the story more.

Gameplay wise puzzles were interesting but also quite hard to figure for the not so good reasons.

One reason is game does not explain how to combine two images at once in our ds machine well. Because of this I needed to check guides for one puzzle later in the game.

Another one reason is game expects you to keep up with every clue location you find. What I mean is sometimes game wants you to do backtracking. I would be fine with it but game never reminds you which objects you need to find again so it was kind of a hassle without a guide.

But rest of the puzzles were nice enough to make me engaged. There were password puzzles, matching puzzles, tool using puzzles etc. So it was enough in my opinion. Like I said my only problems are the ones game couldn't describe itself that well (I hope they didn't do this to lengthen this 5 hour game unnaturally...)

So yeah that was trace memory... Or another code(depending on your region). It was a nice adventure with a abrupt ending and some confusing puzzles. Do I recommend it? If you find it cheap why not. But it doesn't have nowhere near amount of content hotel dusk does (because it's really that small of a game) so keep it in your mind.

Nothing incredible, but there's just something about early titles for a new gimmick console that are so cosy. The way they often fire the console itself straight into the game with a slightly different name is really charming.

One of the themes of this year in gaming, for me, is to experience more from Cing, a defunct studio which I love almost solely on the basis of two games; Hotel Dusk: Room 215 and Last Window: The Secret of Cape West.

Those two games to me are five star titles, not only are they great stories full of wonderful writing, characters and fun puzzles but they do something I’m a big fan of and that’s use the hardware they were designed for in fun and interesting ways.
I’m a “waggle defender”. I love the games of Nintendo hardware where non-first party developers bothered to use what was unique rather than something that could be easily ported to any machine.

Cing are King when it comes to this on DS and in a previous backloggd review, I showed they were pretty good at it on Wii too.

So yes, I played the games in the wrong order and yes completing Another Code R did spoil a minor bit of plot for Another Code: Two Memories but it did not ruin my enjoyment.

Much like the Wii sequel, you take on the role of Ashley who in this title is thirteen years old. She is called to Blood Edward Island to meet with her father who she has not seen in over a decade.
She’s there not only to find out why he has been gone so long, but anything she can about the death of her mother which took place a little while before dad up and left.
The hook? Ashley has been sent a machine called a DAS that looks strangely familiar to you (the player) and this device has messages for you, lets you store photos and then throughout the game aids you in solving puzzles.

I’m a sucker for reflecting the tech the player is using in the game, trying to break the walls of what’s in and outside of the story down.
This game doesn’t do that too deeply outside of aesthetics but as you search Blood Edward Island, meeting a friend, learning the island’s history and uncovering its secrets you get to use the DS in a few unique ways which don’t include simply button presses.

Cing would go on to do these things again and do them better in Hotel Dusk and really those words can be applied to almost every aspect of the game.
Art, music, characters, writing, plot - all of these factors are great in Another Code, it's just that they become excellent in the future.
In a way maybe deciding on how good a game is based on something that came out in its future is unfair but that is what we’re working with and whilst Another Code is brilliant and a worthwhile little gem it’s not a great, expansive or as nice and clever as Hotel Dusk so can’t be placed at those same heights.

Another Code is simple in a lot of ways, to some that would be a fault. The game and the story it tells is quite linear and the cast of characters is fairly small and even where it does expand with the former residents of Blood Edward Island’s history it’s less revelations and more reflections.
The game however is short and that is not an issue, in under five hours it tells a great tale and limiting its scope means that it doesn’t feel baggy or out stay its welcome.
The only case where an eye-roll of boredom ever happened would be clicking on something by accident and being stuck in a little bit of text I’d already read.

I had a great time with Another Code and it was very pleasant going back into Cing’s catalogue and seeing the steps they took to get to where they were with one of my all-timers.

Maybe it’s time to go even further back and play Glass Rose? I’m not sure if I am that dedicated.

After discovering Hotel Dusk, I like many others became enamored by the mystique surrounding its developer, Cing: A tiny team that brought the absolute most out of both the DS and Wii, made 4 Nintendo-published games, and despite that died less than 10 years after being founded.

Out of those 4 games, Hotel Dusk is definitely the most well known, and I absolutely fell in love with it. Beyond the fascinating hardware uses and overall presentation, it was the mood and overall pacing of its story that captivated me. A game relishing in the mundane. Games like Shenmue and No More Heroes captivate me with how they use those chunks of silent, "uninteresting" gameplay to both further enhance the more exciting moments and immerse you more in their everyday worlds. Even Ace Attorney does it in a sense with its investigations.

Long story short: I wanted more Hotel Dusk and decided to try out Cing's first ever Nintendo-published game. And to make another long story short, whilst it definitely shows more rough edges and lack of focus compared to Hotel Dusk, the game's heart is still in the right place.

Its a quirky little game: The textboxes look right out of a flash game, the mouth movements can look flat-out creepy if you pay enough attention to them, and unlike Hotel Dusk most puzzles are moreso there to just...be puzzles, rather than have much of anything to do with the world. Its set up sort of similarly to old-school Resident Evil in that way, I guess. You get a mansion with an assortment of rooms and need to decode how to progress further into the house: Solving a puzzle in the living room gives you a key to a drawer in the office, et cetera.

What really made me draw the Resident Evil connection is the abundance of lore-nuggets sprinkled about: It uses its premise of having two characters with memory issues to let the player ponder over two mysteries at once. Its a neat way to handle the story over its short runtime. Outside of solving that mystery the story isn't all that special on paper, and honestly I mostly played this game as preparation to eventually be able to play Another Code R on Wii.

Yet even in those 5 little hours and all that crust you can definitely feel the Cing spirit here. The atmosphere of Blood Edward Island in general is fantastic, arguably better than Hotel Dusk, due both to the surprisingly large soundtrack as well as the absolutely brilliant use of the two-screen setups. Its straight-up one of the best Adventure game UI's I've ever used, having a 3D-modelled world on one screen as well as 2D stills of the island's most captivating viewpoints on the other. When paired with the music, it creates a kind of immersion I haven't really felt in any other game, and am sad to realize will probably never be seen in any future games given the 3DS' discontinuation. It really does help sell this abandoned mansion's eerieness to both be able to see it at large and see its more detailed spots at the same time.

What also helps with this is that, for as simple as the story is on the whole and as cutesy as the premise seems (A 14 year old goes investigating with her ghost best friend!!), it touches on some surprisingly dark yet very real subjects, with Ashley reacting accordingly. The writer of all four Cing games, Rika Suzuki, has always emphasized that Another Code is specifically about Ashley's mental state first and foremost, and I feel like these moments of discussing betrayal, suicide, abandonment and grief really tie the game together nicely. But really, what'll drive you through the game is its story and atmosphere, alongside the curiousity of how it'll use the DS hardware next.

With its puzzles feeling so deliberately designed to be "DS gimmicks" compared to the more grounded Hotel Dusk puzzles, it end up feeling somewhat self-aware in a really fun way, like "ooh yeah this puzzle is really clever of us", and you yourself cant do anything but go "yeahh youre right", even when they as puzzles are often not anything special. A lot of the time I'd even argue they're too cryptic for their own good.

The story at large is also like a puzzle in of itself, but with its aforementioned short runtime and constant new little pieces uncovered, alongside just generally pretty sweet little character moments, its very fun to just follow along with. Weird, grounded, silly, ominous, crusty, atmospheric: Another Code is most definitely able to be a lot of things in its runtime. At the end of the day I am still very glad I took the time to play it, if only for the memories it gave me.

Playtime: 5 hours
Key Word: Novelty

A masterclass in DS game design that is horribly under appreciated and recognized. It's one of the few DS games that not only uses most if not all of its functions, but uses it so cleverly!!! Without spoiling too much, the game requires you to think outside the box quite literally and when I discovered how literal it was I couldn't help but giggle like the doofus I am.

The story to this game was also just as delightful too. It's nothing too convoluted or grand. Just a very engaging adventure about a 13 year old girl learning about her father's location being on a private island after being gone for 10 years and discovering the secrets of said island.

The puzzles and exploration of this game feel very similar to a point and click PS1 style adventure game. The game felt surprisingly ahead of its time in terms of graphics and exploration, but then again its exploration is very bare bones. Not in a boring way mind you just in an efficient straight to the point way.

A shame the title is stuck on the DS and DS emulation because I think it's a title that is worth remastering for a console like the Switch. It feels like a very important piece of video game history just from how technologically creative it is. I'd hate for it to be widely forgotten.

A potentially dark story that limited itself by being written for kids. Ashley in particular has a pretty weak voice and will oscillate between what feels like her natural voice & an entirely neutral, semi-disinterested observer, which was a major disappointment. Characters also generally behave kind of strangely and the climax of the game felt a bit "just trust me bro". The captain's final conversation & D's farewell did get me right in the emotions, though, and I appreciate that.
I really enjoyed taking photos of setpieces and potential clues & being able to overlay them & rotate them in order to reveal hidden details or codes- a very cool idea that I haven't seen before.
While the game has pretty nice portraits & decent environments overall, its soundtrack & sound effects are lackluster.

Overall, Another Code is a bit greater than the sum of its parts, but it doesn't hold a candle to Hotel Dusk and Last Window.

When I first got a DS, I was obsessed with the idea of this game and never actually bought or played it. I checked it out way later (like 2018 later) and it was sure a videogame.

In my early teen years, one day my mom bought me this game, thinking I'd like it. I played it a lot and liked it, then was suddenly owerwelmed by a sense of dread. It began to scare me and made me so anxious that I had my mom return it.
Years later I played it again til the end and I loved it all over again!
Right now I still love it, and it still gives me a strange sense of anxiety, like if I was really a young girl in an empty mansion where ghosts and adults with bad intentions could appear at any moment. But it's a nice thrill now.

I think the soundtrack adds to the suspance: it's very light and ghostly, so you hear very well the sounds of Ashley's footsteps.
The art style is super charming and stylish.

D's story is so sad...

I didn't play the sequel for the Wii. I'd like to, but it doesn't seem to have the same charm of the DS game. And it doesn't have D (I think)!

D is the victorian child who learns about a happy meal for the first time.


It's a bit short, actually really short, but other than that it's alright

A rather short experience, which is all good in my book. The game has this really somber vibe all throughout as the rather tragic story unfolds, with themes of reminiscence and memories which really kinda stuck with me ngl. Combine that with the pre-rendered Myst-esque backgrounds on the top screen, and you definitely have a vibe. If you are curious about more obscure nintendo games, and you wanna try somethin neat out, you can't go wrong with this. Trace Memory is a better name than Another Code don't @ me

i love this game so much. adore the characters, their motivations, and how the story unfolds. the music and visuals are hauntingly beautiful and i enjoy the DS-era gimmicks. i want to rotate this game around in my mind.

It's alright. Short game with pretty simple puzzles that make use of the DS to the full extent. Decent but predictable story.