After a successful Kickstarter campaign, Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today is set for release this coming spring. A 2D point and click adventure, DS harkens back to its roots to bring a dark and brooding dystopian tale.
Set in the future, you play as Michael, a man suffering from amnesia as he awakes from a coma. What he finds is a world far different than the one he left. A cataclysmic event known as ‘The Great Wave’ has left the world a broken husk of what it used to be. Michael awakens in a refugee camp where the residents struggle simply to survive. The people of the world are also being plagued by a disease known as ‘Dissolving’ which breaks down the body and turns its sufferers into blood. Michael finds himself having visions like those of the ‘dissolved’ and must race to try to stop time itself from dissolving.
DS wears its inspirations on its sleeve as it is a classic point and click adventure. Your character walks around the 2D painted world, meets people and collects items. The items he collects help him carry out actions that help the people populating the camp or the city which give him further things you will need to advance through the game.
The storyline is really the driving the force of the game. In the time I spent with DS, they did a great job setting up a multitude of questions while giving me precious few answers. This left me wanting to keep playing to find out more even though I would regularly get stuck trying to decipher the use of a particular item. Michael’s journey isn’t a simple one and the dark and bleak tone of the game helps to compound that. Michael tries to figure out his forgotten past, what ‘The Great Wave’ was and what is happening to him, giving you a healthy story arc to keep you coming back, even if the quests to help people might not.
As far as this style of game goes, it’s pretty by the books. The people you meet have things they need and you have to get them from around the map. Some of them are immediate, some of them require several steps before completing the task. This usually means that you can blow through the game, but you really need to pay attention to what people tell you or the environment you are in to fully understand what you need to do.
A big downside for me though, was having no ability for hints to help you if you get stuck… which will happen. I spent more than a half hour trying to figure out what to do with some empty cans before discovering where I had to go completely by accident. A simple hint, even in the quest description, would’ve been enormously helpful and limited my time running circles trying to figure out what the ambiguous wording could possibly mean. The gameplay is also considerably slowed down by Michael regularly having visions which have no real bearing on the story until you’ve progressed further into the game. That made being stuck even more frustrating when every few minutes the same cutscene would happen again and again.
Overall, Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today uses its expansive story to propel this 2D point and click adventure forward. The gameplay is fairly commonplace and can be rather frustrating as you try to discover what a piece of glass does or sit through another of Michael’s visions, but the dark tone and art style help flesh out the world as you try to help Michael uncover the secrets of this bleak, dystopian future. While the game may not draw a large new crowd, fans of the genre should keep an eye on this one as it could end up being a pretty solid outing.
