As much as I liked playing through parts of Again, I unfortunately find it quite difficult to recommend within Cing's repertoire. The hook is that you're an FBI agent investigating the Providence serial killings from 19 years ago, and you have special powers that allow you to simultaneously view the past and present on separate screens of the DS. In order to do so, you have to manipulate your current surroundings of the present to match the previously undisturbed past through a series of inventory and touchscreen puzzles to view past events as they played out, thus imitating the real life crime fighting techniques of reconstructing and reenacting crime scenes. It's a little rough around the edges, given that not every difference between the present and past will result in an interactable area of interest, and the game is not great at signaling when the player must exit the crime scene for more clues/evidence versus simply not having investigated enough of their surroundings. Nevertheless, I found this core premise engaging enough to see the entire game through.

Sadly, all the surrounding elements greatly dilute the overall experience despite the fantastic conceptual hook. Again suffers from the classic detective adventure game issue I refer to as the "every" problem. You have to talk to everyone everywhere about everything, every time. This gets grating immediately, and is exacerbated by the sheer amount of menuing, screen transitions, and mandatory flavor text that you have to tap through. In addition, the game often requires players to exhaust every option to proceed in order to pass time while NPCs investigate leads and evidence on their own. The game's overarching premise also backfires here. Because you're specifically investigating past murders, most of your time is spent interviewing former co-workers and family of the former victims. As a result, many of the game's characters exist simply as vessels to convey information of what the deceased characters were like back then, and generally lack any significant identity of their own. Couple that with all the constant traveling since you must ask each witness a new single question every time with each new discovery, and it's far too easy to feel disconnected from the game's plot and setting as a whole.

In a sense, Again may as well be the antithesis of Hotel Dusk. Hotel Dusk was a succinct mystery where much was revealed over just half a day, filled with complex characters all coming together within a connected environment all contributing to the final revelation in their own way. Again on the other hand, plays out over the course of more than two weeks with fairly little happening per day, and is filled with many underdeveloped characters and separated locations that usually have little agency upon the game's events, long forgotten about once the game starts to escalate towards its denouement. I'll give Cing their due for delivering upon the core gameplay premise (aside from the absence of any microphone and DS open/close puzzles) and nailing the true perpetrator revelation and confrontation, but I must admit that Again lacks the cohesion of much of Cing's library and fails to fully realize its potential. Even the conclusion feels like a letdown given Again's cliffhanger ending, though I'll cut them some slack here given that Cing would unfortunately file for bankruptcy in less than a year after the game's release and was clearly setting up for another installment. All I'm saying is that if Arc System Works is looking for another overlooked Cing game to remake... Again might be right up their alley.