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Time Hollow (DS)

DS RRP: £29.99 buy for £24.99

Released: 6 February

From the writer of PS2 classic Shadow of Memories, Junko Kawano, comes another time-travelling tale of a young man determined to change his destiny by manipulating the past. It’s a fascinating story and lends itself well to the DS. If you liked Hotel Dusk and the other slow-paced point-and-clicks on the DS, you’re going to be right at home with this title.

Our protagonist Ethan Kairos wakes up to find that the parents who’ve raised him, and who he has seen every day, have supposedly been “missing” for 12 years. Suddenly his whole life has changed and the way he remembers it isn’t apparently the way things happened at all. Armed with a time-traveling device passed down in his family called the Hollow Pen, he determines to find out why this is happening to him – and to change it.

You’ll have to talk to various characters and visit a variety of locations to piece together unfamiliar memories. Once Ethan knows enough about something you can use the Hollow Pen (your stylus) to draw a circle on screen and create a portal to another time where objects can be manipulated to change history. It’s a great idea and it works well in the game. However with a lot of backtracking and an overly linear progression tree, progress can become frustrating and tiresome.

With a little work a sequel could be the greatest game ever, but this title is paced wrongly. The story is brilliant and genuinely interesting but a game has to back that up with clever controls and compelling interaction or it falls a little flat.

7/10

Review by Kirsten Kearney