The biggest weak point in the presentation is probably how badly the unedited stock photo-core backgrounds clash with the extremely chibified sprites. With art this stylized, I think it's crucial to make the rest of the assets work with it, or the game will just like it doesn't have a coherent aesthetic. But the writing is overall solid; while there are singular text boxes in need of some line editing ("Both our parents always told us that everytime we'd play together to by home by sundown, because usually they'd want us home for dinner, but Victor once told me a story about time stopping an hour past midnight, and that was the real reason they wanted us home by sundown."), Memories Frozen in Time is a decently smooth read.
I think the biggest thing dragging it down is that though the conceit feels like a workable classic short story premise, the execution doesn't nail the most important bits. The kind of specificity you need to make reading about a character's memories interesting isn't really there โ see: how vaguely the video game they played is described โ and the story comes off as unstuck in place and time. It's difficult to buy into the separation between "then" and "now" when they're so faintly rendered. Also, I kind of got the sense that the game ended before it got to the point, given the in-text mission statement is "[to] figure out what drove us apart" and I didn't feel like we really got that far.
All in all, not offensively bad or anything, but lacking in some load-bearing parts. The story wants to be retrospective, but I'm not sure what the trip down memory lane really amounts to.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.