The Almost Gone Review (Nintendo Switch)

Review code used, with many thanks to PLAYDIGIOUS!

Story

*I kind of want this office – it’s adorable!*

The Almost Gone is a very abstract, meandering journey through a peaceful yet desolate world, where the gentle joy of home is corrupted by the deep darkness of tragedy. There are memories and tales of abuse and depression scattered liberally throughout the beautiful and bizarre mind of Emily, from whose perspective we see and learn.

I’m not going to go into too much detail, partially because I didn’t completely understand the overarching story but mainly because I highly recommend this game and don’t want to ruin the experience for anyone! I couldn’t figure out exactly what traumatic event occurred, but Emily’s journey between life and death is enthralling nonetheless.

Gameplay

At its heart, The Almost Gone is a wonderfully challenging puzzle game. There’s a huge variety of puzzles, from constellation codes to controlling a piping system to circumvent a particularly sensitive barrier – every one is different (with one exception, but I’m not going into detail about that!) and almost all had me scratching my head. These mostly take the form of hidden object puzzles, such as solving one puzzle to get a key to get into the next room, or finding something cleverly hidden in plain sight as a clue.

The basic controls are exactly that; left-stick to move your cursor, A to interact, right-stick to navigate between the different rooms, X to open the inventory and then either Y to inspect or A to use. The Almost Gone’s most unique mechanic is the use of view angles – each room can be rotated 90° using either L or R, and the different perspectives offer hidden objects, new interactables, or sneaky environmental clues. I loved the room rotation, as well as the bizarre but fun “dark memories” views that come into play during the later acts, and only had a minor problem with the room navigation. It just felt very clunky on Switch, as if the stick didn’t hit exactly the right angle it wouldn’t work. It is also possible to press the navigation arrow with the cursor, but that was mildly unwieldy when navigating between a number of rooms in a row.

Graphics, Sound, and Performance

The Almost Gone is beautiful. Soft tones, clean lines, and a lack of harsh edges made locating puzzles and objects more difficult, but in the best way possible. From the moment the menu screen loaded I was in awe of the gorgeous design work, which was only heightened during the more gloomy scenes that really imparted a sense of foreboding and unease. My only graphical complaint would be the Act text – it’s in an incredibly difficult to read cursive italic font, that on the handheld screen was almost impossible.

The background sounds are melancholic, and subdued, and give the impression that something isn’t quite right about your situation. It’s beautifully done, with only the occasional sound effect breaking up the almost serene atmosphere. There’s nothing distracting or in-your-face about the music of The Almost Gone, and I couldn’t imagine a better backdrop for this wonderfully introspective game.

The game controls and performs equally well in both docked and handheld mode, although I would recommend playing in docked mode purely for visibility. That said, it was also very enjoyable played on my Lite in bed as a peaceful bedtime game. Definitely use headphones though; the game itself recommends them, and it added an extra level of immersion that had me enraptured across all 5 acts, which took at least an hour each.

Difficulty

*This constellation globe is beautiful!*

I can’t call The Almost Gone difficult, exactly, as the puzzles were generally easy to figure out, but it wasn’t an easy game either. There’s a lot of sequential puzzling, where the outcome from one is required to solve another, and a fair amount of non-linear thinking required – one puzzle required me to obtain numbers for a key-code lock, that were scattered not only across rooms but also across perspectives. The only time I really had difficulty was my own fault; I turned off on my Lite partway through the game saving, so once I loaded on my other Switch the core piece I’d just earned was no longer collected even though I thought it was, so I spent an extra hour looking for what I’d missed!

Conclusion

While there are a couple of minor flaws, The Almost Gone was a beautiful and enrapturing point-and-click mystery exploration adventure that I can’t recommend highly enough. Be warned that there are a number of sensitive topics covered, so it may not be one for the easily upset, but otherwise it’s a truly enjoyable yet saddening tale that deserves a spot on anyone’s download list (and shelf if a physical is released – I’m praying!)

Final Verdict: I Loved It!!

Story

Gameplay

Graphics, Sound, and Performance

Difficulty

Conclusion

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