‘RE:CALL’ Alters Your Memories to Reshape the Present

RE:CALL lets you make changes to your current situation by making decisions during flashbacks. Just need to watch out for the consequences of what you do.

CONTENT WARNING: BULLYING

Bruno has an interesting power: he can recall things differently, which can make things change in the present. And like most time-travelling mechanics, the consequences of changing something small in the past can have a dramatic effect on your situation in the present. Maybe an obstacle isn’t in your way any more. Maybe some useful piece of information isn’t as hard to get as it used to be. This can require layers of changes at times, though, so you always need to be thinking about how you can alter your own memories to bring about the changes you need for your current self.

Also like most time-travel narratives, your actions may do things you don’t entirely expect. A series of decisions may lead to a whole different outcome than what you’d intended, so you need to play around with how things work to get to what you want to happen. What I really enjoyed about this idea was the exploration of how our past affects the present. That’s not exactly a ground-breaking idea, but the game uses weight and past bullying to delve into the power our pasts can have over the present. The game is a call to deeply examine our pasts and how those things can directly affect how we act in our current lives, and how just becoming aware of these effects can help us become more aware.

RE:CALL gives players a power that most of us don’t have and gives you some interesting mysteries to solve with it. There’s something really compelling about making a clue come to you, or making your life easier, by reshaping the past that makes these mysteries so much fun, and so interesting, to unravel. Doing that along with asking the player to consider how their own pasts affect their present gives you an excellent package that narrative puzzle fans will really want to dig into.



RE:CALL is available now on the Nintendo eShop, Microsoft Store, the Epic Games Store, and Steam.

Joel Couture

Joel has been covering indie games for various sites including IndieGames.com, Siliconera, Gamasutra, Warp Door, CG Magazine, and more over the past seven years, and has written book-length studies on Undertale and P.T.. Joel is constantly on the lookout for digital experiences that push the boundaries of what games can be, and seeks to delve into the creative process, meanings, and emotion labor that goes into the work of artists worldwide.