Through a pastel aesthetic, flowy dialogue that pops up when particular objects are highlighted, and a rudimentary inventory system to solve relatively simple drag-and-click puzzles, The Almost Gone spins a dark, sad narrative from the originally whimsical initial input. The mechanics of the puzzles create the entire game – and there are functionally no signifiers that guide the player towards what specifically to do in a given situation – the puzzle mechanics are largely left for the player to discover for themselves.
A particular example of a puzzle that influenced my experience as I played was one connecting tubes between different rooms. The Almost Gone markets itself as a free-flowing dive into mental health and memory, and I felt that the architecture of the game reflected this – as you walk from room to room, only seeing one at a time, and can rotate the room to reveal new walls, furniture, or previously inaccessible spaces. In other words, the cognitive emphasis of puzzle solving dramaturgically reflects the topic matter of mental health. I felt the mental load of this particular game aspect to weigh heavily on my experience – as I necessarily needed to rely on my own mental map of the space to remember how to get back to certain areas, which was difficult as every room kept spinning.
A Pipe Puzzle; notice the red bottle on the ground and the pipe above.
Certain puzzles relied on finishing connection points between rooms and following twisting pipes to ensure that bottles, when shot through, would land in the right areas. While it was relatively simple to understand initially that the pipes were intentionally connected in some way, it took longer to explore enough to reveal both the object to be shot through the pipes and the place to shoot these objects from. This is just one example of a puzzle of many similar ones that relied on objects and interactions between multiple spaces when only one could be seen at a time, which definitely contributed to the narrative of trying to piece together what has happened to the protagonist in the past, and the protagonist’s family, through limited environmental clues and snapshots.
Through the game, I kept creating theses based on the environmental clues. The bathroom is locked and the forest keeps growing everywhere – is this a clue leaning towards the protagonist’s past suicide? Or after seeing the bottles around, was it the alcoholic mother who died? Both? The dad killed animals and abused the player’s mother – did he have something to do with it? As these theses were constructed, they were negated in tandem as more clues were revealed. As I put together the pieces of the puzzles—putting frozen food in the microwave or revealing the histories of neighboring houses through associating them with the people who lived there, or more—I was able to learn more and make further assumptions about the nonlinear narrative experienced by the protagonists.
The Almost Gone is a short game, and the puzzles are deeply satisfying to experience and solve. I do wonder about its ethics – it does assume that the player has a certain amount of mental model making ability, and can notice particular flashing on the screen – at one point, I was stuck because I didn’t notice a small flashing dot on an item in my inventory. I also believe that the game is primarily accessible to previous puzzle gamers, or at least those familiar with escape rooms or other genre-similar games, because it relies on finding keys, searching drawers, and finding hidden rules. I am wondering if accessibility improvements could be made with highlighting relevant objects and making some rules more explicit.
