Review: Hindsight

destructoid.com:

The Annapurna Interactive Showcase from last week might have only been 25 minutes, but it was packed with all kinds of new trailers and info on upcoming releases. One game I hadn’t seen before was Hindsight, and as a love of narrative games (especially those published by Annapurna), I knew it was one I wanted to try out.

In Hindsight, you play as a woman named Mary, traveling through her memories as she recounts her relationship with her parents, her mother in particular. The two have a somewhat strained relationship, wherein Mary’s mother is controlling, which is often at odds with Mary acting like a normal kid.

Hindsight (PC, Nintendo Switch [Reviewed])Developer: Team HindsightPublisher: Annapurna InteractiveReleased: August 4, 2022MSRP: $14.99

Here’s my problem — when looking at the big picture, the story of Hindsight is perfectly functional. It gives us hints here and there about the true nature of Mary’s relationship with her mother, of the underlying resentment for her mother’s cold, distant behavior even when she needed her most. But I’m afraid in this case subtlety may have been mistaken for underdeveloped characters. 

If our dramatic question is “how do we reconcile with the difficult relationships we had with the people we love, especially after they’re gone?” the game leaves us still hanging on that idea rather than addressing it — even going so far as to outright ask the player that question nearly verbatim in its final moments. 

I’m all for ambiguity, but it needs to be earned. I felt like the whole game, I was being told, not shown who these characters were. I wanted it to really dig in and show me how one character’s actions affected another, and vice versa. Instead, it was scene after scene reiterating