Time travel stories are… tricky to write.

Mostly because the mechanics of time travel itself are so easy to mess up. The idea of going to a time period that you don’t belong to, interfacing with events that have already happened, running the risk of changing the future with your actions… it’s a lot of little considerations running under the surface every time a character is like “let’s go back to the past : D” and it’s very easy to miss even one of them and have your story become much more clunky. A good amount of time travel stories make this work by just not giving a shit — embracing the contradictory, messy nature of time travel and just kind of shrugging most of its implications off. Other time travel stories try to solve these issues by placing a great deal the “rules” of time travel, and while doing this right can result in neat, self-contained stories, doing this wrong, can, well…

So Shadow of Destiny follows the story of this guy named Eike who is enjoying his afternoon walk when suddenly the wind stabs him in the back and kills him. He then encounters a supernatural being named Homunculus, who grants Eike the ability to time travel in the hopes that he can stop his own untimely death. It becomes clear though, however, that death seems to be following Eike as he goes about his day, and the player must move Eike around the city, travel through different time periods, and solve inventory puzzles both to uncover the mysteries surrounding the story, and to delay your own death for just another half hour…

In theory, it works. I’m a fan of how the story is presented. The way it functions is that as you travel through time and explore the city of Lebensbaum, there are differing ways that you can solve puzzles and progress through the game. Through taking these differing paths, the story takes different directions, and the clues Eike (and through that, the player) receives is never quite everything you need, which is a neat way of uncovering the in-game mysteries presented to you. This mechanic is further extended by the ending, where — depending on a choice made in the 5th chapter and the method you complete the 8th chapter — you can receive one of five endings, each of which solve one aspect of the mystery… while still leaving you in the dark about others. It’s a cool way to handle a story built on multiple overarching mysteries, and, in theory, it’s a great incentive to replay the game and give yourself the full picture.

I also like the general artstyle, and how it helps to characterize each of the time periods you go through. Each version of Lebensbaum you run around has a different layout owing to how the city has changed throughout history, and this is represented by each time period having a radically different colour palette attached to it. This both helps to indicate the main characteristics of each time period — the early 1900s being in black-and-white given the recurring motif of photography, as an example — and to help immediately show the differences between each time period as you enter them, providing a throughline for the main strength of the time travel mechanic. Seeing locations, the characters you meet, and even the city itself change as you run around through time is a super strong concept — both seeing the origin points of familiar locations and interacting with different versions of the same character. Even better, in theory, is how the things you do can radically change parts of the future, providing another layer to the adventure game gameplay and, theoretically, creating some cool solutions to puzzles.

I say 'in theory' a lot, though, in regards to talking about the positives of this game, and that’s mostly because while there’s stuff that’s super cool on paper… the truth is that this game is a total mess and mostly only has its concepts to back it up. The big issue, in regards to this, is that it’s an adventure game, and like most subpar adventure games, the puzzles operate on a level that… isn’t exactly intuitive or entirely logical. Even beyond the usual issue where often a walkthrough feels required in order to figure out what you’re meant to do, the way the puzzles interface directly with the plot often just makes the plot seem… a lot more stupid than intended.

Like, here’s an example: you’re talking with this waitress, and right as the conversation ends, you get stabbed by your assassin, out of sight because of the giant tree behind you. You get sent back to the moment before you have the conversation, and, with the knowledge you have, are now tasked to prevent your death from happening. Now, you might think the obvious solution is to, say, avoid being in the area in the first place, or get away from the tree as soon as possible, or anything kind of obvious, but that’s not the solution the game puts forward. See, what you actually have to do is have an identical conversation with the waitress (like, seriously, the cutscene is the exact same as the first time), go back in time to the 1500s (fucking taking the waitress with you), scare some puritans away with your mobile phone, and convince the guy planting the tree that you’re actually the local lord so that he’ll never plant the tree, which, when you go back to the present (leaving the waitress in the past without a second thought), stops the assassin from killing you because ??? and lets you go further into the game. And, like, I get that there needs to be a puzzle and stuff, but you can still, like, hit that balance of making your core mechanic of different time periods feel meaningful while also not completely undercutting the plot with all the dumb stuff you have to do to progress it. Because, like, what I put up there? The second puzzle. And it keeps getting more stupid from there.

But even then, juxtaposed with the… insanity of the puzzles, the story is mostly just… boring? My gameplay experience mostly came down to “die, go back to the time period the game tells you to, walk somewhere, sit through a five-minute cutscene, do some stuff, get hit with another five-minute cutscene” and often it felt like the game would just stop in its tracks to deliver a super dry, uninteresting conversation about stuff that ultimately I don’t think actually matters to the story (like, to the point where I’m pretty sure only two of the five time periods actually matter to the grander plot?). The cutscenes that deliver plot-relevant information, in the meantime, are all wrapped in this layer of garbledegook that makes things feel complicated and incomprehensible and not in a particularly fun way — more that it was making me have trouble figuring out what was going on until nearly the very end where all the fat gets trimmed and things are finally explained to you. I’d be more down with the stupid stuff with the puzzles if it was consistently like that the whole way through (a la Knee Deep) but when it keeps getting interrupted with dry, elongated cutscenes insisting you try to take it super seriously… it’s a diptych that does neither half favours, and getting pulled so hard in both directions just makes the overall experience inconsistent and not particularly great.

There’s more in terms of things I didn’t particularly like — your time travel works on a fuel system and how this ends up working out is that you are scouring Lebensbaum to try and find the pellets you need to continue the story while you desperately hope you haven’t accidentally softlocked yourself — but I’ve been spending too long trying to write this game up and I wanna just finish it. tl;dr… Shadow of Destiny is certainly an interesting game, and there’s certainly a universe where the mechanics it has on paper work out… but in practice, between the stupid puzzles and the boring, incomprehensible plot the game, while not particularly unpleasant to play, is too muddied and out there to feel anywhere near good. 4/10.

What if you could travel back in time to prevent your own murder? PS2 adventure game Shadow of Destiny poses this question, then proceeds to do nothing interesting with it, stranding flat characters in 4 hours of mostly-just-slow-cutscenes where nothing important happens until the last 30 minutes.

However. Those 4 hours of cutscenes also manage to somehow all feel like they were crafted by aliens trying to approximate human interaction, and the extremely awkward, sometimes uncomfortable early-PS2 character models and bad voice acting just help strengthen that effect.

The game also has some of the most galaxy brain puzzle solutions I have ever seen. As an example, at one point protagonist Eike gets stabbed by somebody waiting behind a tree. Eike decides the way to prevent this is to travel back in time 500 years to prevent the tree from ever being planted in the first place. In another instance, Eike repeatedly travels back 100 years and changes the course of a family's history to acquire mundane items like a frying pan or a book.

All this combines to make the game unintentionally hilarious and an absolutely wild ride. I had a great time playing it. But, I really wish that the story could have also been good and compelling, because I don't think those two things need to be mutually exclusive