The Past Within is a puzzle game in the style of The Room series. The twist is that you play online with a friend co-op. One of you is in the past, the other the future. Communicate with each other to solve puzzles in each other's times. Unfortunately, the puzzles really never pan out to anything but direct answers for the other person. One player sees a time written on the wall, the other enters that time in a clock. One player sees a formula on the wall, the other enters that formula into their chemistry set. That's really it. Keep going until the end. The strength of the game is that it has the art of the Rusty Lake Hotel people. They do some neat and cute things with that art. Are you a big enough fan of that art to overcome very basic puzzles? If you're happy with spending 60-90 minutes on that, shrugging your shoulders and saying "That was alright", then forgetting all about this game.
There could have been a fun spiritual QFG buried in here, but any chance of that is killed by the fact that 90% of the game is repeating the same tasks every day to grind stats, or waiting around for arbitrary triggers. You would THINK that exploring the hidden mysteries of your Hogwarts school at night would be interesting, but it's not. Rather than discover things based on exploration or puzzle solving, you solve them by waiting around for days until an arbitrary trigger solves it for you. Except when it doesn't. You never know if you're not progressing because you haven't done something, or if the time based trigger hasn't kicked in yet. So it's all the very worst parts of QFG: stat grinding and waiting around until plot triggers happen. Except it was never this bad in QFG, and at least in those games there was lots of locales to explore. Hero-U is like being stuck in town all game, you can only play the Thief, and all the fun Thief activities are taken away.
There was a very, very brief window of time in the mid 90s (late '94-'96) where game graphics hit this weird phase. Everyone was burned out on the early 90s FMV fad, but home gaming technology wasn't quite ready to give us first gen 3D yet. To fill the void, games started giving us some very bad pre rendered CGI where every character looked like a blow up doll modeled in Poser. D was one such game (Take 2 would also release a bunch of adventure games with the same look). You're basically playing a very, very bad version of The 7th Guest with that graphic style instead of FMV. 80% of your time will be spent watching the extremely slow, unskippable walking and turning animation between screens. The few puzzles there aren't clever, just tedious. The elevator section is one of the most frustrating and tedious adventure puzzles I've ever suffered through (only the maze from 2016's Obduction matches it). Oh yeah, you're also on a 2 hour timer and it's game over if you don't beat it in time. Who thought this was fun? The ending is so abrupt and stupid that I honestly laughed out loud. Imagine if The Exorcist ended with Darth Vader popping up to proclaim "I am your father!". It is THAT dumb. Like another review said, there were half a dozen infinitely better adventure games to come out the same year as this. Only pick up if you enjoy morbid curiosity as a gaming historian, delving into an and embarrassing graphical period of gaming.
While there are a very brief few moments where you can almost see some bits of SC2 goodness buried in here, for the most part everything is a let down. The bright ship sprites have been replaced with dark, washed out looks. The puppet work for the aliens was designed to look good for box/ad screenshots, but it looks VERY clunky and cheap in motion. The colony management system is a huge pain and only serves to top off your crew and fuel. It was meant to replace the lander in SC2 but it's a much bigger pain. The music is forgettable. Literally. I can't remember a single track, but I can remember a dozen SC2 tracks over 30 years later. Finally, the story. Woo boy Remember the imposing threat posed by the Ur-Quan and Kohr-Ah? Well now you're just dealing with a collection of goofballs and main villains whose primary trait is being lazy and making their underlings do all the work. This is concluded by one of the most anti-climatic endings in any video game I've seen. Picture the ending to Mass Effect 3, except the Reapers never even show up, and everyone forms a Care Bear Stare to save the day. It's THAT lame. I would say only buy it at a large sale, and only if you're morbidly curious and want to poke around for the small pieces of good ideas floating around in a sea of disappointment.
My experience was a cute puzzle game with mostly interesting enough challenges that I was never bored. My only gripes are some of the later levels are way too big. The puzzles don't get more challenging so much as they become hard to remember all the locations, what was in them, and how new items in your inventory (or information from other puzzles) apply to which of the 20 screens you now have access to. The 2nd level house area was the perfect size. They should have stuck to that. But I would still say that the full $20 is WAY too much for this. Fortunately, it is frequently on sale for $2, which is a crazy bargain.
Honestly I would buy this at half price ONLY if you had a bad movie night group of friends. You would then get one hour's of cheesy entertainment out of it. Anything else, nope. It's obvious that it's stitched together from an unfinished product. The choices are non-sensical. The dying and restarting gets VERY annoying at the end. You are thrown into a looping maze with zero clues or logical direction. You just try "left" or "right" randomly until you stop dying. You can stumble across a random person who breaks the 4th wall to flat out tell you the directions, except they're wrong so there's still no solution! Finally, at the end, every time you die, you're forced to sit through an entire 3-5 minute long sequence to get back to the choice. The upside is the plot is crazy. You have Nazi Clint Howard as a villain. There's a good fake dummy death.
Everything Capstone made was shit. Everything. Some were worse than others, but once you pass a certain threshold of terrible (they were), any differences become purely academic. To argue that this is better than bottom of the barrel stuff like Operation Body Count is like saying a solid shit is better than a diarrhea shit. Does the difference even matter if you're a food critic? I played this at release and was floored even at the time that someone would even bother releasing a (bad) Wolfenstein 3D clone one full year after Doom. It was laughably outdated even at the time. The level and enemy designs are worse than W3D. There's no value to be had here unless you're some kind of time traveler trainwreck enthusiast and are really really desperate to historically document just how bad some games of the era were. But even in that case, just go watch the Civvie11 youtube video.
A game that's a blend of 4X and FTL? Play a 4X game where the goal is to amass a certain amount of resources before the turn timer counts down before traveling to the next "sector" and try to reach the end. What a great idea. What a terrible execution. It's very pretty to look at, reminiscent of Endless Legend. The GUI is very messy and unclear though. Which is bad considering how RIDICULOUSLY tight you have to be, with even perfect play not being enough to survive. You will frequently receive goals to amass resources that are not present on the map. The option for trading on the market is there, but the exchange rate is so bad that it's just not realistically feasible. On top of that, the RNG can instantly end your run with bad events in ruins (how often did a single event end your run in FTL?). To give you an idea, even half the tutorials are nearly impossible without absolutely perfect play, mathing everything out exactly up to a dozen turns in advance. The game is a great idea, but it's like they came up with the idea and the mechanics for the game, then did absolutely ZERO playtesting to balance the economy, map generation, or difficulty. Avoid until this is sorted out.
