Review for Another Tomorrow
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Have you ever woken up and not remembered what happened before you fell asleep? “How did I get home last night?” “When did I go to bed?” “Why is there a pineapple on my nightstand?” Take that confusion and multiply it with about a thousand, and you’ll have a sense of the bewilderment you can expect at the beginning of Another Tomorrow. Waking up in a pool of (your own?) blood, you find yourself in an unknown basement, with absolutely no memory of who you are or what has happened. By puzzling your way through a variety of new locations, you’ll slowly uncover the truth in this beautiful isometric point-and-click game. And for better or worse, when I say puzzling, I mean “Puzzling” with a capital P.
Although the basement might bring on some Saw-like vibes, don’t worry, there will be no hurting of yourself or others here, unless you should be so stupid as to stick your hand into an open fire or touch a steaming hot pipe. No, Another Tomorrow is all about finding out who you are, and why you are in this certain predicament.
The game is a classic point-and-click, where you’ll only rely on your good friends Mr. Left and Mr. Right mouse button, as well as your inventory for applying the tried-and-true “pick up item, use item or combine item with other item” formula. You also have a camera you can use to take photos of hints and helpful locations, although I preferred to use my trusty notepad – and believe me, this is a game where you will need to take notes, or photos, whatever is your preference. With these tools in hand, you set out to uncover what happened to you before you woke up in a puddle of blood in a dank and dark basement.
There’s not much to be said about the protagonist, as he doesn’t know who he is, and neither do you. Early on you find out that his pregnant wife was killed in a car crash, and from there the hunt for the guy responsible becomes your main focus. As the game progresses, you’ll slowly learn more about the man’s past through flashbacks, newspaper clips, phone messages and other snippets of information, but you really don’t discover that much more until the very end.
There isn’t any dialogue other than what the protagonist mumbles to himself, and you don’t encounter any other characters during the game (Except for a cat. You pet a cat, and it is wonderful). Sure, various other people are mentioned, but there is no interaction with them until the final cutscene, which makes the experience kind of lonely. The game’s sense of humour is great though, conveyed largely through the protagonist’s observations and monologues whenever you click on different things around you. This makes for a bright touch in an otherwise dark game with a gloomy atmosphere.
So what drives Another Tomorrow forward, if it’s not narrative or characters? Puzzles! Puzzles, you ask? Yes, puzzles galore, even, puzzlemania if you will. The whole game is based on solving puzzles, looking for clues, solving even more puzzles to find useful items to use on more puzzles, and… well, you get the idea. The puzzles are completely irrelevant to the story, and yet they make up almost the entirety of the game.
Overcoming obstacles is what drives you closer to a resolution about what has happened, but at the same time they are completely random, and often kind of unlikely. You have the classic kind like the one with a locked door, a pen and a newspaper; another where you piece together a broken record; and a fun little pop quiz about Glitch Games themselves (some of the answers being easy to find in-game, and some of them requiring a guess, since I didn’t know enough about them). Most of the time, however, you need to find a clue such as a sequence of symbols or numbers and use it in the correct order in a puzzle box or something similar. For instance, at one point you need to solve a cryptex using a very sneakily hidden hint, and another puzzle based on a kind of a word jumble was so satisfying to complete that I felt I could join Mensa afterwards. On the other hand, some puzzles were so easy that it felt almost like a joke. One of the first tasks is to just position some sliders correctly, and it made me a bit worried that all the puzzles would be that ridiculously simple.
Thankfully, many of the puzzles are challenging to solve, though keep in mind that this is the kind of game where nothing is there for no reason. If you find yourself stuck (and you probably will), there will usually be a clue close by. That graffiti on the wall might not just be random scribbles, and maybe that licence plate has a deeper meaning.
Linking the various hints to their specific puzzles can be difficult, but it is also great fun. Many of the puzzles are really entertaining and well-constructed, and it gave me great satisfaction when I was able to solve some of the more difficult ones without any help. Should you end up getting stuck, there is a hint function that helped me more times than I am comfortable to admit. The hints are based on which puzzles you have solved or not, and you can choose from a list of numbered hints, as well as complete solutions if you are absolutely lost.
The puzzles can be so engaging that the experience becomes all about reaching a new location, scouting out all the puzzles (and there are MANY), and figuring out which ones you can solve with a clue or an item you already have. When I solved one puzzle, I usually got a clue or an item to another puzzle, so I went to solve that one, and so on and so on. Unfortunately this does make the game rather repetitive and tedious, and though I completed it in about eight hours, it sometimes felt a bit too long because of this.
The puzzles can also overshadow the story, as after a while I got more focused on solving them than unravelling the big mystery of the protagonist’s identity. At points I totally forgot why I was in a location or how I had gotten there in the first place. Then again, while it would spoil the plot if I said anything more, it became pretty clear a bit too early on what was really going on with the main character, which made even the plot reveal in the end uninteresting.
Visually, Another Tomorrow is really good-looking. Not only are the graphics of high quality and pretty, but the first-person point of view is very interesting, as your perspective is isometric. The static scenes can’t be moved or rotated so navigating the environments is fairly easy, as you click your way through them with your Mickey Mouse glove-like cursor, which turns yellow when you hover over something of interest. The perspective gave me the feeling of looking down into a miniature diorama or a doll's house.
There are also a surprising number of locations to explore, all of them varied and beautifully designed, beginning in the previously mentioned dank basement before venturing through the likes of an empty bar, a large apartment, a cabin in the woods, an airport, a motel … the list goes on. The gloomy lighting helps set the dark atmosphere that goes well with the hopeless situation the main character is in, and the scenes are not only detailed but really cool to look at. One thing that struck me as a little weird, though, is that you never meet or even see anyone else in any of these places, and I missed some kind of interaction that would break up the monotonous puzzle-driven gameplay.
Another thing that is a bit monotonous is the music, because the same tracks play over and over through the whole game and they seem to play without any regard to the locations or current circumstances. It sounds a little like random elevator music, and it doesn't bring anything extra to the atmosphere.
One thing the game deserves extra credit for is its accessibility options. Among some of the features are a special dyslexic-friendly font and the ability to adjust all in-game text to be bigger and move slower, as well as options to move all the in-game icons such as the inventory and camera to better suit left-handed players. I really appreciate it when developers take the time and effort to implement choices like this, as it makes games easier to play for those with disabilities.
Ultimately, Another Tomorrow is a fun and at times challenging game with loads of beautifully made locations and enjoyable puzzles. If you’re on the lookout for a game with a riveting story, well-written dialogue and intriguing characters, you might be disappointed, and the experience can feel a little repetitive as a result. However, if you are more into puzzles than narrative, I definitely recommend checking it out.
