With My Past

Beautiful, fun, clever, touching game!

AVOID | LACKING | MAYBE | [b][u]WORTHWHILE[/u][/b] | COMPELLING | UNMISSABLE With My Past is a side-scroller puzzle platformer with a narrative focused on mental health. There is a fair amount of variety in terms of difficulty and types of puzzles in this game - some puzzles are straightforward and others require a lot of thought. Some puzzles are heavier on the platforming side and others are more on the thinking side, but easy to implement once you figure it out. Once you complete the game, you open up a second B-side mode which features many new puzzles without any narrative. The game introduces new mechanics as you progress as well. You use your shadow/former self to help solve puzzles. In this way, it reminded me of the game Shady Part of Me. The narrative focuses on a young woman coming to terms with her past. Some of the English was a bit wonky in places, but it's clear what was intended. Also, the game gets bonus points for referencing Beauvoir XD In general, if you're a fan of true puzzle platformers, With My Past is a solid pick. I think the game explored its narrative in a bit of a shallow way even though it's super present throughout. In that way, it was a bit disappointing. That said, if you don't care about narrative all that much, I think the rest of the game is pretty good. The A-side of the game took probably ~2-2.5 hours to complete and the B-side took ~3-3.5 hours to do. However, I did look up some solutions for the B-side because I was going crazy with some of the puzzles, so YMMV.

Liked it