(This is the 69th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
We have reached Game #69. Nice. Even nicer that this milestone was achieved with a good game, Flashback, a 'cinematic' platformer by Delphine Software that released some time in 1992. There are a few ways in which you could describe this game. I don't think anything would be more than apt though than calling it "ahead of its time", for mostly good but also bad reasons.
This game uses rotoscoped animations and would be best compared to other platformers such as Prince of Persia and especially "Another World", otherwise known as "Out of this World". While Prince of Persia was made by Broderbund, Another World was also developed by Delphine Software, and having played Flashback, feels like what Catacombs 3D is to Wolfenstein 3D, meaning that it feels like a short tech demo to show what's possible. (Fun fact: Just like Flashback is a milestone game for this challenge, Another World was the 50th game I reviewed)
If that doesn't give you an understanding of rotoscoped animations, think of the original Mortal Kombat, which probably is the most popular game to use this technique. It's basically the technique describing animators tracing over motion picture footage to create an illusion of realistic and very fluid animations.
Flashback has a lot of good traits, but definitely stands out thanks to using this animation technique. It has sold over 2 million copies over time and was at the time of its release the best selling French game of all time. It released for more platforms than Skyrim did, and initially released for the Amiga, though funnily enough had been created for the Sega Genesis originally. There is a sequel that released in 1995 called Fade to Black and Flashback 2 is set to release in November 2023 at the time of posting this review.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 8/10
This game shines here in many ways, and primarily in presentation. What makes this game unique is that it has cinematic cutscenes in a cyberpunk style and using polygon graphics that you're not going to see anywhere else apart from Another World. You can tell the devs really took their time making these and they definitely add a lot to the overall experience thanks to their great presentation. For example, in an early cutscene, you wake up and accidentally drop a 'holocube' as you get up. Then, in another cutscene, when you find the holocube, you can see it displaying a message while the main character is holding it in his hands. Cutscenes also play every time you pick up an item or give one to another character. It's a small thing that enhances the meaning of finding a key item, and even though the cutscene has half a second loading screens before they play, I still appreciated them.
Now for the story. You play Conrad B. Hart, a graduate student and agent of the Galaxial Bureau of Investigation (GBI). He is also described as an "overall cool dude" in the manual. You run away from some sort of spaceship with your own, but crashland in an unfamiliar area. When you wake up and pick up the holocube I just mentioned, the message that appears is from your past self. Apparently, you willingly removed your memory and need to see your friend Ian in "New Washington" to get it back.
You play the first level and make your way over there. In the first level, you meet a wounded stranger who asks you to find his teleporter so he can teleport to safety from these woods that you are both trapped in. Later, you meet an elderly man on a chair next to a giant hole. He says he will give you an Anti Gravity Belt if you have enough credits for him, so you can jump down to the next level.
Once you make it to New Washington, you are met with the sort of setting that would have made me go crazy at the time. There is a subway system that lets you visit for key areas in New Washington that are called "America", "Asia", "Europe" and "Africa". In one of these locations, you will find a bar, in another, you will find a room with job notices that you can take on with a work permit, in another, there is an Admin office that gives you said work permit.
In practice, this ends up being a level where you continously backtrack to ultimately pay another NPC to move on to the next level, and it does get boring and frustrating at times, but to have a world that actually feels real like this in a video game from this time period is extremely rare and absolutely worth a positive mention.
The overall story is relatively interesting as well. The manual has a comic book style opening to the overall story, which you will be able to find with a quick Google search. It shows what happens before the story begins, so maybe you'll want to look at it after playing the game, since figuring out what happened before Conrad lost his memory is part of the appeal of the story. I'm not going to spoil anything, and it doesn't get the crown for most in-depth story for a non-RPG and non-graphic adventure (I'd still give that to Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake) and it also does not have any shocking twists, but it's entertaining enough and most importantly really well presented that the reward you get from learning more is ultimately pretty satisfying.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
This is a platformer that uses rotoscoping for its animations. This means movement looks really fluid and life-like, similarly to Prince of Persia and Another World. These animations don't just look real, but often they also play out like they would in reality, meaning they are deliberately slow. This has its positives and negatives. On the one hand, this slow movement means a methodical and strategical approach is more important, because there are plenty of enemies that you need to fight here as well. On the other hand, slow is slow. When you have to go over the same section of the game for the 5th time or have failed to make a jump three times in a row, having to wait for animations to play out will get a bit boring after a while.
The game has a somewhat convoluted control scheme that takes getting used to. To reach a platform right above you, you need to stay at one specific point below it and grab up. This makes Conrad grab on, and if you keep pressing up, he will climb up. If you are a single step behind or in front of this spot, he will not hold on. For 7 hours, I constantly had to do one extra step to be in the right position. Not a terrible thing, but annoying at times. It gets worse when there is a platform that is above you but on the other side of the room. Here, you need to hold A, press RIGHT/LEFT to sprint (you needed to run straight) and then UP to jump up. Or was it RIGHT/LEFT again? Actually, it's both. I couldn't quite figure out which one the game wanted me to do for specific jumps, but some jumps required you to press RIGHT/LEFT twice, and others required you to press RIGHT/LEFT first and then UP later. But what timing do you need for the jump? Do you press the appropriate button multiple times hoping the game recognizes your input in time? Do you button mash? Or do you hold on to the button? I can tell you that all approaches worked at times and didn't work at others. Finally, another frustrating thing that would happen is from being able to roll forward when crouching. The game doesn't scroll but rather plays on independent screens. Whenever you enter a new screen, your action from the previous screen would be remembered however. So if you roll from one to the next, you keep rolling as the next screen loads up. In some screens, there would just be pits that you would fall right into, and if you fall too far down, you die. Happened more often than I'd care to admit.
Dying is another thing. There are SAVE points in this game, but sometimes they are pretty far apart. You have 5 lives that you can recharge at certain checkpoints. If you ever die, and you will plenty of times, you go all the way back to your last save point, which can set you back as far as 15-30 minutes easily and all the progress you made is lost. Fall damage takes all your health, and running into portal-like things that have green myst coming out of them instantly kill you too, so you can imagine how many cheap deaths await in this game that make you lose hours of progress over the course of your playthrough.
But enough of the negatives. Despite these points, which do make me reluctant to recommend this game to anyone but retro gamers who have grown somewhat immune to these pains, I had a fun time with this from a gameplay perspective overall.
You are equipped with a simple gun at the start. Taking on enemies with it is not as simple as going in run and gun style. You need to crouch at times to not get shot first yourself, you can throw stones to distract them first or alert turrets that shoot the enemies for you, and you get a force field later on that acts as a shield if you time it right. You can also use teleportation devices or explosive mechanical mice later on to spice things up further.
Apart from combat, you do a lot of platforming and puzzle-solving, which either involves figuring out where to go or, if something is blocking your way, figuring out how to bypass it. It's never too difficult but enough of a braintease as well, so I liked the difficulty here. You collect key items like, well, keys, quest items and credits that allow you to make progress. These are on the floor randomly and some are hard to see, so you basically have to walk over every inch of a level to not miss anything. You get a Pick-Up notice once you are on top of an item, so you will find all of them just by being thorough.
Overall, the game offers a strategic challenge in both platforming, puzzle-solving and combat that I appreciated. It was enough to have me entertained for the 7 hours I played. I feel like the atmosphere did a lot of the heavy lifting to make some of the more frustrating parts more bearable. I would call this game "ahead of its time" because it offers a lot of things that just feel futuristic at this point, but the technology at the time meant many things couldn't be done in a way that the devs probably wanted, which means we got some frustrating gameplay parts as a result. The sequel is a 3D adventure game, so I'm curious to see if the devs were able to make use of the three years of technological progress to make gameplay more enjoyable throughout.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting, at least in the Sega Genesis version I'm reviewing. Later, the game would release for the Sega CD for example, where CGI cutscenes and voice actors would be used. I've seen some footage and the voice acting sounds like it takes away more than it adds to the atmosphere, so you'll be fine with this version of the game.
Sound design ranges from meh to excellent, and I particularly love the sounds that are added in to the short cutscenes when you pick stuff up or give and take items.
The soundtrack can be described similarly. Very sci-fi, really adds to the atmosphere. Music plays at specific points of certain screens or during combat, and overall the use of music can be described as "sparingly", and I can't say I mind this. Lots of games with incredible atmosphere forego the use of music for most parts of their gameplay. A great example that comes to mind are the Soulsborne games. This would mean that the game should make me listen to the protagonists footsteps and to the environmental sounds to further set an atmosphere, but for some reason footsteps are only heard while running, not walking. Seems like a weird thing to not do. But back to the soundtrack. Great, when used. Overall the OST is only about 15 minutes long.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
Can't go through this section without going over the rotoscoping that is used here. The animations here are to this day some of the more realistic you will see. Very clean. There is no question what the main reason is for why this and Another World still have a cult following to this day.
Apart from this, graphically there are nice special effects and diverse locations to compliment. It's not a very colorful game despite its cyberpunk theme and most of the game plays in grayish-green outdoor areas.
The HUD consists of an icon on the top right showing the item you currently have equipped. The UI opens up by pressing START and is a simple inventory screen with 4 items shown per line. Move to the item, select START again, and done. There are some items that are always useful, like the force field, and many items that are only useful once or twice, so it would have been nice for these very useful items to be equipped and useable without having to switch to it mid-combat every time. Or for example, charging stations serve one purpose for 99% of the game - charge your shield/hitpoints. Just because it is used for something else once (!) you need to equip shield every time you want to charge it, which seems like something that could have been automated.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10
There are a lot of ways through which this game manages to set a very good atmosphere. The animations of course add a lot of realism at a time where this was hard to achieve. The sound design and soundtrack set a great sci-fi vibe. Cutscenes add close-up looks at the events. New Washington, while backtrack-heavy, is an unusual setting for a level because it creates the illusion of a genuinely lived in oxymoronic tiny metropolis, something that was uncommon at the time. Cutscenes playing when picking up an item or giving something to a different character also add immersion on a deeper level, even if it is a tiny detail. Overall, I definitely felt like there was a world here that the developers actually thought about and they did a great job of making it seem grounded and realistic despite the sci-fi theme.
CONTENT | 6/10
The game takes roughly 6-8 hours, a pretty good length for a game of this type. It's not too short to appear more like a tech demo like Another World, and it's not too long to overstay its welcome. You can tell by the missions you are assigned that there is only so much variety the game has to offer, so I appreciated that it ended when it did. The game does a solid job of offering new challenges throughout, but as I mentioned over this review, there are too many parts where the gameplay does hold the fluidity of the game back, along with the pretty annoying save system, which was only manageable to me thanks to the emulator's own save state feature.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10
The level design in this game has high and lowlights. Highlights are New Washington, where the pros of its uniqueness outweigh the cons of the backtracking that you need to do there. The balance of platforming, combat and puzzle-solving is also well struck. On the negative side, dying setting you back so far, death coming unfairly too often, and some gunfights being in awkward locations that are made even more awkward by the control scheme of the game are some of the more prominent points.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
This isn't the first game to use rotoscopic animation nor cinematic cutscenes. Another World did both of these things. That game didn't do it on this scale though, and animations look a lot more fluid in Flashback. The game is not groundbreaking in what it does, but it certainly is daring and innovative, and I really like that. Games in this time period pre-CD and pre-3D often stick to the status-quo, similarly to what is being critiziced in modern times, though there was little complaining at the time. Magazines had no issues spreading around 8s and 9s for nearly every game for not doing anything special at all. So developers who try something different are always much appreciated, and while these innovations did come with some drawbacks in this game, I can say the good absolutely outweighs the bad overall.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
No replayability here apart from trying to beat your high score and maybe using some tools that are optional, like the mechanical mice.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 72/100
70+ is usually "at least check it out" territory for me. With this game, I have the same recommendation to retro gamers for sure, but unlike, say, a Super Mario World, Zelda or Monkey Island, Flashback has A LOT of the noticeable growing pains that come with old-school video games. I'd understand if it's too much for some people to take. That said, the game does plenty right as well and its unique status is undeniable.
We have reached Game #69. Nice. Even nicer that this milestone was achieved with a good game, Flashback, a 'cinematic' platformer by Delphine Software that released some time in 1992. There are a few ways in which you could describe this game. I don't think anything would be more than apt though than calling it "ahead of its time", for mostly good but also bad reasons.
This game uses rotoscoped animations and would be best compared to other platformers such as Prince of Persia and especially "Another World", otherwise known as "Out of this World". While Prince of Persia was made by Broderbund, Another World was also developed by Delphine Software, and having played Flashback, feels like what Catacombs 3D is to Wolfenstein 3D, meaning that it feels like a short tech demo to show what's possible. (Fun fact: Just like Flashback is a milestone game for this challenge, Another World was the 50th game I reviewed)
If that doesn't give you an understanding of rotoscoped animations, think of the original Mortal Kombat, which probably is the most popular game to use this technique. It's basically the technique describing animators tracing over motion picture footage to create an illusion of realistic and very fluid animations.
Flashback has a lot of good traits, but definitely stands out thanks to using this animation technique. It has sold over 2 million copies over time and was at the time of its release the best selling French game of all time. It released for more platforms than Skyrim did, and initially released for the Amiga, though funnily enough had been created for the Sega Genesis originally. There is a sequel that released in 1995 called Fade to Black and Flashback 2 is set to release in November 2023 at the time of posting this review.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 8/10
This game shines here in many ways, and primarily in presentation. What makes this game unique is that it has cinematic cutscenes in a cyberpunk style and using polygon graphics that you're not going to see anywhere else apart from Another World. You can tell the devs really took their time making these and they definitely add a lot to the overall experience thanks to their great presentation. For example, in an early cutscene, you wake up and accidentally drop a 'holocube' as you get up. Then, in another cutscene, when you find the holocube, you can see it displaying a message while the main character is holding it in his hands. Cutscenes also play every time you pick up an item or give one to another character. It's a small thing that enhances the meaning of finding a key item, and even though the cutscene has half a second loading screens before they play, I still appreciated them.
Now for the story. You play Conrad B. Hart, a graduate student and agent of the Galaxial Bureau of Investigation (GBI). He is also described as an "overall cool dude" in the manual. You run away from some sort of spaceship with your own, but crashland in an unfamiliar area. When you wake up and pick up the holocube I just mentioned, the message that appears is from your past self. Apparently, you willingly removed your memory and need to see your friend Ian in "New Washington" to get it back.
You play the first level and make your way over there. In the first level, you meet a wounded stranger who asks you to find his teleporter so he can teleport to safety from these woods that you are both trapped in. Later, you meet an elderly man on a chair next to a giant hole. He says he will give you an Anti Gravity Belt if you have enough credits for him, so you can jump down to the next level.
Once you make it to New Washington, you are met with the sort of setting that would have made me go crazy at the time. There is a subway system that lets you visit for key areas in New Washington that are called "America", "Asia", "Europe" and "Africa". In one of these locations, you will find a bar, in another, you will find a room with job notices that you can take on with a work permit, in another, there is an Admin office that gives you said work permit.
In practice, this ends up being a level where you continously backtrack to ultimately pay another NPC to move on to the next level, and it does get boring and frustrating at times, but to have a world that actually feels real like this in a video game from this time period is extremely rare and absolutely worth a positive mention.
The overall story is relatively interesting as well. The manual has a comic book style opening to the overall story, which you will be able to find with a quick Google search. It shows what happens before the story begins, so maybe you'll want to look at it after playing the game, since figuring out what happened before Conrad lost his memory is part of the appeal of the story. I'm not going to spoil anything, and it doesn't get the crown for most in-depth story for a non-RPG and non-graphic adventure (I'd still give that to Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake) and it also does not have any shocking twists, but it's entertaining enough and most importantly really well presented that the reward you get from learning more is ultimately pretty satisfying.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
This is a platformer that uses rotoscoping for its animations. This means movement looks really fluid and life-like, similarly to Prince of Persia and Another World. These animations don't just look real, but often they also play out like they would in reality, meaning they are deliberately slow. This has its positives and negatives. On the one hand, this slow movement means a methodical and strategical approach is more important, because there are plenty of enemies that you need to fight here as well. On the other hand, slow is slow. When you have to go over the same section of the game for the 5th time or have failed to make a jump three times in a row, having to wait for animations to play out will get a bit boring after a while.
The game has a somewhat convoluted control scheme that takes getting used to. To reach a platform right above you, you need to stay at one specific point below it and grab up. This makes Conrad grab on, and if you keep pressing up, he will climb up. If you are a single step behind or in front of this spot, he will not hold on. For 7 hours, I constantly had to do one extra step to be in the right position. Not a terrible thing, but annoying at times. It gets worse when there is a platform that is above you but on the other side of the room. Here, you need to hold A, press RIGHT/LEFT to sprint (you needed to run straight) and then UP to jump up. Or was it RIGHT/LEFT again? Actually, it's both. I couldn't quite figure out which one the game wanted me to do for specific jumps, but some jumps required you to press RIGHT/LEFT twice, and others required you to press RIGHT/LEFT first and then UP later. But what timing do you need for the jump? Do you press the appropriate button multiple times hoping the game recognizes your input in time? Do you button mash? Or do you hold on to the button? I can tell you that all approaches worked at times and didn't work at others. Finally, another frustrating thing that would happen is from being able to roll forward when crouching. The game doesn't scroll but rather plays on independent screens. Whenever you enter a new screen, your action from the previous screen would be remembered however. So if you roll from one to the next, you keep rolling as the next screen loads up. In some screens, there would just be pits that you would fall right into, and if you fall too far down, you die. Happened more often than I'd care to admit.
Dying is another thing. There are SAVE points in this game, but sometimes they are pretty far apart. You have 5 lives that you can recharge at certain checkpoints. If you ever die, and you will plenty of times, you go all the way back to your last save point, which can set you back as far as 15-30 minutes easily and all the progress you made is lost. Fall damage takes all your health, and running into portal-like things that have green myst coming out of them instantly kill you too, so you can imagine how many cheap deaths await in this game that make you lose hours of progress over the course of your playthrough.
But enough of the negatives. Despite these points, which do make me reluctant to recommend this game to anyone but retro gamers who have grown somewhat immune to these pains, I had a fun time with this from a gameplay perspective overall.
You are equipped with a simple gun at the start. Taking on enemies with it is not as simple as going in run and gun style. You need to crouch at times to not get shot first yourself, you can throw stones to distract them first or alert turrets that shoot the enemies for you, and you get a force field later on that acts as a shield if you time it right. You can also use teleportation devices or explosive mechanical mice later on to spice things up further.
Apart from combat, you do a lot of platforming and puzzle-solving, which either involves figuring out where to go or, if something is blocking your way, figuring out how to bypass it. It's never too difficult but enough of a braintease as well, so I liked the difficulty here. You collect key items like, well, keys, quest items and credits that allow you to make progress. These are on the floor randomly and some are hard to see, so you basically have to walk over every inch of a level to not miss anything. You get a Pick-Up notice once you are on top of an item, so you will find all of them just by being thorough.
Overall, the game offers a strategic challenge in both platforming, puzzle-solving and combat that I appreciated. It was enough to have me entertained for the 7 hours I played. I feel like the atmosphere did a lot of the heavy lifting to make some of the more frustrating parts more bearable. I would call this game "ahead of its time" because it offers a lot of things that just feel futuristic at this point, but the technology at the time meant many things couldn't be done in a way that the devs probably wanted, which means we got some frustrating gameplay parts as a result. The sequel is a 3D adventure game, so I'm curious to see if the devs were able to make use of the three years of technological progress to make gameplay more enjoyable throughout.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting, at least in the Sega Genesis version I'm reviewing. Later, the game would release for the Sega CD for example, where CGI cutscenes and voice actors would be used. I've seen some footage and the voice acting sounds like it takes away more than it adds to the atmosphere, so you'll be fine with this version of the game.
Sound design ranges from meh to excellent, and I particularly love the sounds that are added in to the short cutscenes when you pick stuff up or give and take items.
The soundtrack can be described similarly. Very sci-fi, really adds to the atmosphere. Music plays at specific points of certain screens or during combat, and overall the use of music can be described as "sparingly", and I can't say I mind this. Lots of games with incredible atmosphere forego the use of music for most parts of their gameplay. A great example that comes to mind are the Soulsborne games. This would mean that the game should make me listen to the protagonists footsteps and to the environmental sounds to further set an atmosphere, but for some reason footsteps are only heard while running, not walking. Seems like a weird thing to not do. But back to the soundtrack. Great, when used. Overall the OST is only about 15 minutes long.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
Can't go through this section without going over the rotoscoping that is used here. The animations here are to this day some of the more realistic you will see. Very clean. There is no question what the main reason is for why this and Another World still have a cult following to this day.
Apart from this, graphically there are nice special effects and diverse locations to compliment. It's not a very colorful game despite its cyberpunk theme and most of the game plays in grayish-green outdoor areas.
The HUD consists of an icon on the top right showing the item you currently have equipped. The UI opens up by pressing START and is a simple inventory screen with 4 items shown per line. Move to the item, select START again, and done. There are some items that are always useful, like the force field, and many items that are only useful once or twice, so it would have been nice for these very useful items to be equipped and useable without having to switch to it mid-combat every time. Or for example, charging stations serve one purpose for 99% of the game - charge your shield/hitpoints. Just because it is used for something else once (!) you need to equip shield every time you want to charge it, which seems like something that could have been automated.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10
There are a lot of ways through which this game manages to set a very good atmosphere. The animations of course add a lot of realism at a time where this was hard to achieve. The sound design and soundtrack set a great sci-fi vibe. Cutscenes add close-up looks at the events. New Washington, while backtrack-heavy, is an unusual setting for a level because it creates the illusion of a genuinely lived in oxymoronic tiny metropolis, something that was uncommon at the time. Cutscenes playing when picking up an item or giving something to a different character also add immersion on a deeper level, even if it is a tiny detail. Overall, I definitely felt like there was a world here that the developers actually thought about and they did a great job of making it seem grounded and realistic despite the sci-fi theme.
CONTENT | 6/10
The game takes roughly 6-8 hours, a pretty good length for a game of this type. It's not too short to appear more like a tech demo like Another World, and it's not too long to overstay its welcome. You can tell by the missions you are assigned that there is only so much variety the game has to offer, so I appreciated that it ended when it did. The game does a solid job of offering new challenges throughout, but as I mentioned over this review, there are too many parts where the gameplay does hold the fluidity of the game back, along with the pretty annoying save system, which was only manageable to me thanks to the emulator's own save state feature.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10
The level design in this game has high and lowlights. Highlights are New Washington, where the pros of its uniqueness outweigh the cons of the backtracking that you need to do there. The balance of platforming, combat and puzzle-solving is also well struck. On the negative side, dying setting you back so far, death coming unfairly too often, and some gunfights being in awkward locations that are made even more awkward by the control scheme of the game are some of the more prominent points.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
This isn't the first game to use rotoscopic animation nor cinematic cutscenes. Another World did both of these things. That game didn't do it on this scale though, and animations look a lot more fluid in Flashback. The game is not groundbreaking in what it does, but it certainly is daring and innovative, and I really like that. Games in this time period pre-CD and pre-3D often stick to the status-quo, similarly to what is being critiziced in modern times, though there was little complaining at the time. Magazines had no issues spreading around 8s and 9s for nearly every game for not doing anything special at all. So developers who try something different are always much appreciated, and while these innovations did come with some drawbacks in this game, I can say the good absolutely outweighs the bad overall.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
No replayability here apart from trying to beat your high score and maybe using some tools that are optional, like the mechanical mice.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 72/100
70+ is usually "at least check it out" territory for me. With this game, I have the same recommendation to retro gamers for sure, but unlike, say, a Super Mario World, Zelda or Monkey Island, Flashback has A LOT of the noticeable growing pains that come with old-school video games. I'd understand if it's too much for some people to take. That said, the game does plenty right as well and its unique status is undeniable.