With so many story driven interactive experiences and story exploration titles around nowadays videogames are covering many topics and themes in various ways. Hindsight takes a form of something like an interactive photo album with a really cool visual style and a story about loss and grief. But for how pretty it is, playing it isn’t particularly enjoyable.
This title was clearly developed for a touch screen control and I wouldn’t be surprised if there it feels somewhat more enjoyable to play. With a mouse, however, it is often a rather frustrating experience even if you crank up the camera movement at least by a quarter up. You see – the gameplay process of Hindsight is you flying through small freeze frame-like scenes with the ability to rotate the camera around. And when I say the ability, i mean the requirement, because to progress to the next scene you have to find a particular hotspot to click. And that hotspot can sometimes only exist when you rotate the camera to a certain angle. This looks cool, but in practical terms means that to “turn the page” you have to drag your mouse around until you find an angle that the developers consider correct that let’s you proceed further. And while in some cases that angle is visually tied to the perspective of the scene, most of the time it seems completely arbitrary and existing just so players have “stuff to do” because “it’s a videogame you see”.
When not being frustrating to go through, the title tells a story well enough, but here I feel that it might click for some and not for others. For me, for example, it didn’t – partially because the whole narrative is very “being stuck in the past is good”, partially because it speaks of very “growing up in US” experiences that are entirely alien to me. But I could easily see others liking the story and connecting with what it’s going for. And it is told in a nice and stylish way.
If Hindsight didn’t try so desperately to add interactivity for the sake of interactivity, I feel that I would’ve enjoyed it more. And even though I didn’t connect with the story at all, it would’ve at least led to a far more enjoyable experience through someone’s life with pretty visuals.