About a year and a half ago I played Trace Memory, a DS point-and-click from the developers of Hotel Dusk. I thought it was a quaint relic of its time, a somewhat uninteresting but charming DS title. Now, Trace Memory (and its Wii sequel) have been remade on Switch in full 3D. I have many of the same opinions about this game as I did its original. The main character is interesting enough and the two plots, dealing with her family and the family of a ghost boy she meets named "D", are engaging as well. The game is somewhat dark when it comes to D's story, but given he's clearly dead it perhaps shouldn't be much of a shock. The puzzles are nice enough, but I don't think anyone is going to be having any difficulty at all with them. If anything, I recall being somewhat stuck on some puzzles in the DS original, but I never had any issue here. It is one of those games where the player will realize puzzle solutions and plot beats far earlier than the characters do, and you'll have to grind your teeth waiting for them to come to the same realization. I think if you remember Trace Memory fondly, you'll enjoy this game, although I'm not sure if I can recommend it to anyone else, it just doesn't stand out enough. This version does come bundled with the remake for the Wii sequel (which was never released in North America), so we'll see if that game makes the collection worth the time.

Reviewed on Jan 31, 2024


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