Happy Volcano and Playdigious have released a sobering exploration of divorce, grief, and family strife through bewitching dioramas and small, gradual glimpses of broken relationships.
It may look like Monument Valley, but The Almost Gone entrances players with the minimalist and striking art design while setting them up for a narrative shock with the revelations and secrets that pore out of the darkness behind the soft pastel colors.
The award-winning author Joost Vandecasteele crafted the story, and players will have to be diligent in order to discover all of the hidden information that’s packed into each diorama. It’s a puzzle game split into five chapters that will progressively dive deeper into the dysfunction and despair of one troubled family.
It’s a puzzle, a story, and an investigation into the human condition. But how is it as a game?
STORY
The child of a broken marriage. The grandchild of a shattered man. The only one willing to dig down beneath the cracked facade and look for the darkness within the family and within every one of us.
Life and death, love and hate, truth and lies. All of it is spiraled into a web of inscrutable rooms, items, and memories, both fractured and whole.
This is a game in pieces and a story in parts. In houses, hospitals, suburbs, and more, there will be clues to uncover an understanding of the people and places that surround you in life.
Why are you here? Why are you trapped? Will you ever get home?
Will you discover these answers?
GAMEPLAY
The Almost Gone is a point-and-click adventure that involves puzzles spread across dioramas. Inside each square are pieces of the world with which a player can interact. These offer small morsels of truth and perspective of a family that’s experienced crisis after crisis.
It looks beautiful, but it gets dark.
You can rotate each panel or square to fully explore the environment and the puzzles are either completed within one square or within one environment.
What I like about puzzle games is the feeling of delight whenever an obstacle is overcome. Discovering the right maneuver, the right interaction, or the right combination of actions is a joy and the narrative of The Almost Gone encourages you to continue by revealing more and more of this world. It’s like a wreck that you can’t look away from. You’re glad it isn’t happening to you, but the tragedy of it is an instant reminder of our mortality and of the fragility of life.
Things that are whole can easily be broken and once the fissures start to form, they can’t be stopped.
That exploration of the narrative is what strengthens the gameplay. Unlike my time with 1971 Project Helios, the mechanics of The Almost Gone are intricately tied to the world-building. The whole is greater than just the sum of its parts.
I did experience some frustration with puzzles throughout the game, though. Several are rather obtuse and it takes a while to figure out how to proceed if you missed some obvious (or minuscule) clue. And given the nature of the visual design, you can only see the diorama you’re in. If you want to backtrack, you either need to remember the exact orientation and direction of your previous path or you must wander between all of the dioramas until you retrace your steps.
And that leads to another area of discussion. Yes, the game is short and the maps aren’t huge, but it would be nice to have some mini-map or menu option that can allow you to see where you’re at in relation to where you want to go.
Maybe that would mess with the immersion. Maybe it would take away from the feeling of confused wandering and soul-searching that the narrator is providing. But it would ultimately make the gameplay more smooth, and I think it’s something that should have been considered more heavily.
It could easily be added in a later update, but it’s something that I think would improve the player experience.
For the most part, though, The Almost Gone is an engrossing experience with calm and tranquil gameplay that’s contrasted by traumatic revelations that ebb and flow from the reflective mind of Joost Vandecasteele.
It’s an indie game that highlights some of the best innovative design and creative ideas that small studios are able to share.
VISUALS
I mentioned Monument Valley earlier, and that’s one of my favorite puzzle games. And probably my favorite mobile game.
The Almost Gone possesses that same visual magic that makes me want to stay in the world. It’s got soft colors, sharp lines, and a fascinating environment. All within a system of rotating rooms, movable objects, and strange mysteries.
Whether you’re in a home, a neighborhood street, a hospital, or a treehouse, it transports the players from the real world to some far-out place that is at once alien and yet familiar.
You’ve never seen it before but you feel like you’ve known it your whole life.
That’s part of the beauty in The Almost Gone.
REPLAYABILITY
Because the story is so dense, so heavy, I don’t imagine retreading my path through the game more than once. It’s a powerful narrative… and a troubling one.
Also, once you finish a puzzle game, part of the mystery is gone. Part of the magic has been lost. For that reason, it would be up to the individual player to decide if it’s worth the return visit.
WHAT IT COULD HAVE DONE BETTER
Some navigational features would have been helpful, and maybe some (gasp) hints available in the menu in case a player just misses that one narrative cue or small object scattered across the environment.
Those are relatively small quality-of-life changes, though, and I mostly enjoyed the ride in The Almost Gone.
VERDICT
It’s enchanting. It’s heart-breaking. It’s mind-bending. It’s a wonderful little indie game full of puzzles and weighty reflection on the things that make us break and the things that make us human.
The Almost Gone is worth the play. It’s a reasonable price for a visually-sumptuous game and I’m looking forward to what Happy Volcano does next.
