Are you ready to dive into your memories and tell us about your life in retrospect? Time to craft your own story and gameplay based on the decisions you make and the collectibles you collect. What direction will your life take?

In Retrospect, developed by Paper Salamander Games, is definitely an interesting adventure, basing the story on the memories you choose, or even based on some of the decisions of your own life. Depending on the decisions you make, you’ll shape the story of the character, but dialogue options aren’t your only way to tell your story. There are collectibles to find along your way, and you can choose which one to focus on. These are health, wealth, love, education, creativity, and spirituality.

Collecting specific collectibles gives you upgrades for the following chapter, for example, health will provide you with double health, and wealth will give you access to a shop, but I found it quite challenging to focus on a single one. They kind of shoot out sporadically, so I was just grabbing everything I could and waiting for my outcome at the end of each chapter.

The game is pretty much scrolling the whole time, whether it’s horizontally or vertically, you’re pretty much always moving. There was seemingly no way to change the speed at which you were moving, which made it quite challenging to avoid some of the threats in your path, so learning the path became a viable way of playing.

As you play through, you unlock more abilities, like double jump, dashing, dropping down faster, and more with progression. Along with multiple difficulty options for the story, from casual, where you have a lot more health and heal faster, to Hardcore, with less health with a slower rate of healing, there are also challenges and leaderboards to compete in for the more extreme players who want more of a challenge and something more after completing the story. These challenges come with preset abilities and an outlined description of what they are so you can always be prepared for what you get yourself into.

Its colourful 16-bit art style makes it feel very retro, accompanied by its large assortment of levels, enemies, and hazards, the game always feels fresh as you play through. This is further accompanied by a great soundtrack, where every stage has its own song which often syncs with the gameplay.

In Retrospect the game is quite fun and full of challenges for replayability, maybe a little too challenging for me but I can definitely see the appeal for the players who do enjoy these kinds of games.

Written by: MrVibeAU