A PC Style Mystery on a Portable System.
The plot is interesting enough. A 14-year-old girl travels to a private island in order to find the scientist father she thought was dead. Along the way she meets several characters, including the ghost of a young boy, and must solve a mystery.
The graphics are very good compared to other DS offerings. The music does a little to set the mood, but the overall sound is not that impressive. All dialogue is in the form of written text, which somewhat hurts the amount of player immersion into the title. There are times that the deeper parts of the game create a Resident Evil type atmosphere, but this is severely hindered by reading line after line of printed text on the small DS screen.
The gameplay is what sets this portable title apart from the others. It is basically a text-driven, point-and-click PC adventure/mystery title. While I would not be impressed with it as a PC release, it does come across impressively on the DS. Players use the touch screen and stylus to inspect and manipulate objects in order to solve puzzles. The use of a touch screen makes the game much more interesting that the traditional mouse click system for this type of game.
The puzzles do not take a masters degree to solve, and gameplay can be a little linear at times. Only certain areas of rooms can be closely inspected, which often gives players strong hints about where they need to be looking for items. Trace Memory is not a long title in terms of playable hours, but offers plenty of satisfaction during the first playthrough.
Fans of PC mystery games will probably find this title short and easy, but may have a little fun with the touch screen features. Gamers like myself, who have gotten used to a steady diet of platformers and fighters on handheld systems, may be refreshed by the different style this game offers.
Trace Memory doesn’t bring anything revolutionary to gaming, but it does present a lesser-known genre to a vast number of gamers who may never have experienced it before. The title is worth playing just for the experience, but it is not necessarily a “must buy” title. I applaud developers for bringing this title to the DS and look forward to similar offerings, but the poor sound quality, lack of spoken dialogue, and limited free-roaming gameplay keep it from being something that all gamers need to have in their collection.