The point and click adventure genre has seen an upswing in recent years thanks to the rise of the Nintendo DS. It's not a huge comeback or anything, but everything starts somewhere, and in this case, the roots of this revival can be, uh, traced, to Nintendo and Cing's Trace Memory. Known as Another Code to the rest of the world, Trace is a decent first attempt at a graphic adventure game, with some decent characters, solid mystery, and a few occasionally mind-bending puzzles. It's a good package that's hampered by brevity and a bit of a pedestrian story, but if you can score the game cheap (I nabbed it for 10 bucks new) it's a solid waste of a day or two. Cing's newer game, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is a far superior game, but Trace Memory isn't all bad as a tuneup for Kyle Hyde's superb adventure.
Trace Memory has you solving not just one mystery, but two. The main character is Ashley Robbins, a 13 year old girl who has believed for the last 10 years that her parents are dead. On the eve of her 14th birthday she gets a package...from her father, telling her to come to Blood Edward Island. Also in the package is a DTS machine, which looks exactly like the old-school DS Phatty, which holds important secrets and other vital information. With her aunt in tow, Ashley heads for the island to find the truth about the disappearance of her family. At the same time, Ashley meets up with a spirit who goes by the name of D, who serves as the opposite side of the story – that being the unraveling if the mystery of the island and the mansion the game takes place in, as the place has gone from a lively estate to a deserted, somewhat haunted home with a seriously dark secret trapped inside.
Throughout the six chapters of the game, Ashley will solve puzzles and move through the creepy, abandoned mansion. This isn't like the mansions from Resident Evil fame, as the Edwards Mansion is deserted, though there's still a decidedly creepy vibe to the place, with trick doors, weird puzzles, and plenty of enlightening notes and books spread around, not to mention matching music to portray the mystery aspect better. Ashley and D wander the mansion together, with D identifying whatever he can remember about the place, providing hints to Ashley whenever possible. There's no action sequences or anything, but instead progressing through each section of the game involves thoroughly checking every room for clues and frequently tricky puzzles that can require blowing into the DS microphone, slamming the system shut, or running around to find special tape to watch the inside of a zoetrope, to name a few. Almost every room has some sort of mystery.
Clearly the game was designed to take advantage of the DS capabilities. The dual screens are even better used than in Hotel Dusk, with the fully 3D overhead perspective up top (which looks pretty good) and hand-drawn closeups when you've hit a place to explore. It's possible to explore and check things out without using the stylus until a puzzle that requires it pops up, which will suit more traditional gamers. The aforementioned use of the microphone and the tricky need to slam the DS shut like you're putting it in standby are pretty novel uses of the device. One particular puzzle requires closing the system only halfway to align the screens in a particular fashion to reveal the answer, obscured slightly because Ashley makes reference to 'needing a mirror' to figure it out. Another time, early in the game, the DTS camera feature comes into play, as you have to take a picture of two things and then overlap them on the top screen to reveal a passcode to get past a door. It's not particularly tricky, just creative.
While the gameplay of Trace is solid enough and will please those looking for some cerebral or unique gaming, its story doesn't quite live up to its potential. After all, graphic adventures need plot to survive, and Trace Memory somewhat struggles. It's certainly interesting enough and starts out so well, solving the mystery of the mansion and also searching for Ashley's dad, but it's so predictable, and every major moment has something to it that doesn't seem right, and it's blatantly obvious most of the time. By the end of the game you know more than the characters do and can draw conclusions faster than they can, which is frustrating when it's so obvious. When you're doing a mystery game, you just have to have some unpredictable moments, something that clearly was learned in Hotel Dusk, given all the wild plot twists in that game, but Trace seems to forget that.
Not only that, but Trace is also painfully short, especially for the genre its in. There's no way to actually get a game over by screwing up a puzzle or answering one of the post-chapter questions wrong, so the 5 hours of gameplay go by very quickly unless a puzzle really stumps you, which is possible. Even that 5 hours of gameplay (which is how long it took me to clear it) should really say 4, because the final chapter has absolutely no gameplay aside from pressing the buttons to advance text and generic running around to the final objective – but that's a good thing since there's no way to save after Chapter 5. There's some backtracking here and there to artificially extend its life but there's no way anyone is going to be fooled. And because there's not much variance to the gameplay, a replay game is almost a waste of time as there's only a few subtle changes to the game with a 'new game plus' scenario. Clearly this is why the story struggles – they're rushing it all in rather than space it out a bit and add some more puzzles and rooms to explore.
Closing Argument If you can find it cheap, Trace Memory is a fine time waster for the DS. At 10 bucks the 5 hour gametime can be forgiven to a point, and instead you can focus on solving the puzzles and enjoy the decent, though predictable story. Trace definitely shows promise, promise that did appear just this year with Hotel Dusk, meaning the lessons of this game were put to good use. It's not for everyone, as people needing some sort of action (or even a sort of failure since there's no game over here) won't be interested, but for a less skilled gamer who relies more on wits than twich abilities, or someone who really likes their graphic adventures this is right up their alley. Between this and Hotel Dusk Kyle Hyde's game is a whole lot better, but if used as a tune-up for the kind of style that game presents, Trace Memory offers something unique and different regardless of length or a story that's not given enough time to flesh out.
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