Each time offers an effective contrast to the consistently-colourful Eike. 1580 sees maids and lantern-carrying guards roaming the streets, w hilst the snow-covered 1979 deserves exploration, as a lot of its shops are awash with gorgeous little details, though the period is visited far less than the other time lines. The older eras are predictably the most unusual, both in terms of architecture and inhabitants. Whilst the layout of the town remains much the same throughout each period, the contrasting visual approaches prove both impressive and cohesive. Shadow of Memories look s great for an early PlayStation 2 outing. The characters are pretty decent too and it’s all extra appealing, given the opportunities to alter their destinies along with Eike’s. It’s absorbing stuff the storyline is mostly very well-devised and though there are some lengthy dialogues, it’s atmospheric and immersive. There are other far-reaching decisions, such as influencing the owner of an old house to convert it either into a museum, or a library. The Butterfly Effect is crucial to saving Eike, such as asking a gardener to plant flowers as opposed to a tree, so then when he’s attacked in the present, there’s nowhere for the assailant to hide.
Decisions made in earlier times chang e ‘ present day’ Lebensbaum. T imelines in 1979, 19 not only feature new personalities, but distinctive visual styles too: the 16 th Century appears almost sepia in its yellow and brown hues, whilst the turn of the 20 th Century look s austere, drab almost to the point of monochrome. The game instead focuses on challenging brainpower and awareness, with time your greatest foe. It’s a n original and well-crafted effort, with severa l brave and progressive ideas. As the chapters pass, the web becomes more complex, with new time zones becoming available. E very time Eike interacts with them, thirty seconds is whittled from the time, nudging things closer to the time of his death. C ertain members of the community can hold important information, whilst others offer idle chat. Whilst Eike is exploring Lebensbaum, time ticks along in real-time. T hroughout your travels, yo u’ll always have half an eye on the clock. The adventure is split into eight chapters: each typically beginning with the hapless hero being bumped off, handed some hints by the mysterious ‘Homunculus’, and then sent back out there a short while before he’s destined to meet his doom. You’ll likely spend longer watching Eike than controlling him, but don’t let th at put you off. One of Konami’s early PlayStation 2 showcases, Shadow of Memories is what we’d now think of as a narrative adventure, albeit with a fair bit of explor ation and item gathering thrown in for the sake of player involvement. Kitted out with a time-travelling device, Eike is returned to the quaint town of Lebensbaum (Life Tree), to change his destiny and discover the identity of his assailant in the process. However, as Eike soon discovers, avoiding one attempt on his life won ’t solve the overriding problem. After his unceremonious murder in the opening cut-scene, Eike is resurrected by a mysterious entity, who tells him he can avoid his fate by changing aspects of the past. Before 24 hours have passed, he’ll have been stabbed, burned, bludgeoned, poisoned, run over and pushed to his death from a tower. The 8 th of April 2001 is a really bad day for Eike Kusch. A couple of decades later, it’s easier to appreciate a story- driven game that uses time travel and exploration elements to involve its player. Thus it’s left to a convoluted and eclectic story to do most of the heavy lifting. SoM was without many of the staple gameplay aspects of its contemporaries: there’s no combat and its puzzles are largely confined to the realms of fetching and using prescribed items. As evidenced by the magnetic beach-landing level in Medal of Honor: Frontline, d eveloper s sought to fuse the special-effects bombast of movies seamlessly into their games, something that’s be come more prevalent as the years have passed. The big -hitters from the early part of the next (sixth) generation would instead help usher in a style of gaming dominated by visual impact. To some degree, however, this would prove a false dawn. G ames were becoming more cerebral, focusing on sophisticated narratives and immersive, creative gameplay mechanics: a media finally growing up, alongside its audience. Konami’s recent successes, most prominently Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill, had mirrored the industry’s promising late-nineties trajectory. At the time of the game’s release, it would have been understandable to look upon this quaint adventure with a glass-half-empty outlook. Though it might not have seemed likely in 2001, time has proven fairly kind on the quirky whodunnit that was Shadow of Memories.
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