The Almost Gone

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

The Almost Gone is a Graphic Adventure that has you moving through a series of rooms that seem to represent a sort of waking dream of the protagonist’s family’s unhappy home, as the player solves puzzles to progress further to try to not only figure out what’s going on, but learn about the broken lives that formed this family. This game was released on multiple platforms in 2020, including Nintendo Switch.

This game uses a simple, stylized presentation that is fairly decent, but feels like it’s lacking some degree of personality as its faded pastels seem too mundane for the dark tale the game seeks to tell. Having said that, the game does have some interesting symbolism present, whether it’s roots growing into the house or a wedding cake that’s sliced in half, separating the bride and groom, to find a positive pregnancy test buried inside. At the very least, the writing here is pretty good, and the creepy sound design definitely does a better job setting the mood than the visuals.

The gameplay here has everything separated into cube-shaped rooms that can be spun around to view from one of four directions, with players moving a cursor to click on objects and doing the usual Graphic Adventure thing of searching for items to solve puzzles. There’s nothing too novel here when it comes to this, and the room-spinning thing doesn’t seem to contribute much to the puzzles, save for perhaps obscuring elements if you don’t look at the room from all angles.

However, the room-spinning thing does contribute to one of the game’s bigger problems, and that is that it makes it much easier to get disoriented, and without a map you’ll undoubtedly waste at least a little time going the wrong way and trying to catch your bearings. Another problem is that a game doesn’t make it clear when highlighting an object whether clicking on it will allow you to manipulate it further, or make you re-read the description for that object, condemning the player to see most of these descriptions twice lest they miss a vital clue or puzzle needed to proceed.

A few other notes – despite this game also being released on iOS, the Nintendo Switch version features no touchscreen controls, despite that it could really benefit from having them. Also, it bears mention that some of the game’s text here is fairly small and a real pain to read. It definitely feels like there wasn’t much effort made to optimize this game on Switch.

There are elements I like about The Almost Gone. The writing and sound are decent, and the puzzles are interesting, but the elements of this game’s design that make it unique also make it needlessly frustrating, and with so many fantastic Graphic Adventure games on the Nintendo Switch, I can’t see any good recommendation to play this one.

tl;dr – The Almost Gone is a Graphic Adventure that has players going through cube-shaped rooms and finding out about the protagonist’s unhappy family life. The writing and sound design here are good, but the game design is needlessly tedious and the presentation leaves something to be desired.

Grade: C-

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