Re:Call’s Memory Manipulating Puzzles Are Snappy, Smart, and Truly Standout

ign.com:

When I first started playing Re:Call, I was wearing green overalls and I had a cup of tea on the table next to me.

Or, wait. Maybe I was wearing blue overalls and I was drinking cocoa.

Or could they have been pink overalls, with a cup of coffee?

That’s the kind of twisty, recollection labyrinth you’re playing with in Re:Call, a game about rewriting memories to become true history. You play not as any of the game’s protagonists, but as a ghostly entity who, when partnered with a person, gives them the ability to change how things previously happened simply by relating them in different ways to listeners. This premise blossoms immediately in Re:Call’s early hours into a delightful puzzle game, where a man named Javier writes and rewrites his account of breaking into the lair of a criminal mastermind, the Toymaker, in hopes that by adjusting the past sequence of events enough he can create a present-day situation that allows him to escape the Toymaker’s clutches.

If that’s a bit confusing, here’s a very early example: the Toymaker asks Javier to relate how he broke into the facility in the first place, and is interrogating him in a room accompanied by a guard wearing a green uniform. In Javier’s recollection, he can recall that the door to the facility was watched by no one, or by a blue or green guard. He can also find either a gun on the ground, or a rock. Choosing the gun, and then choosing to shoot the guard causes the green guard in the room with them in the present to suddenly drop dead – he was shot, after all. Problem solved, right? Maybe not. Even though Javier’s account rewrites everyone else’s memories with it, too much mucking with reality will confuse and alarm them, so overly-dramatic reality shifts may not always