In it, you play as a nameless old man, who dies in the prologue. The afterlife finds him in a series of lush worlds that are all based on the events throughout his life, and journeying through them will allow his spirit to recover his lost memories and come to terms with them.
Since he retains his frail physical form, he is not able to merrily jump and skip like most protagonists. Luckily, he is instead able to manipulate time within these worlds, and thus alter the environments until he is able to advance through them.
Compare to freeware games Passage or And Everything Started to Fall.
Arise, the Tropes!
- Childhood Friend Romance: As gradually revealed, the man and the woman who becomes his eventual wife have known each other since they were children.
- Collection Sidequest: A Platinum trophy requires getting every one of the paintings depicting notable moments in the old man's life that are scattered throughout the worlds.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Since your character is already dead, falling off, freezing to death, burning, etc. simply throws him back to a very close checkpoint.
- Exposed to the Elements: During the winter-time area, you need to be constantly in the vicinity of a heat source, or else the old man will freeze to "death".
- Heroic Mime: The protagonist never speaks, but neither does anyone else.
- Hollywood Darkness: Averted. One of the areas is set at night-time, and is so dark, that actually making out the platforms you need to jump onto is practically impossible. Instead, you need to freeze the time at around the exact moment lightning strikes, and its flash will illuminate the area.
- Nameless Narrative: Nobody in the game is ever named.
- No Antagonist: There is no-one in the game to fight against. It is just about surviving and navigating the environment of each of the worlds. Even the shadows that populate certain levels are simply representations of the old man's inner demons.
- Snow Means Death: In their later years, a sudden snowstorm catches the man and his wife whilst they were enjoying a picnic in the wilderness. They successfully make their way back home but the experience causes the wife to fall gravely ill, leaving her bedridden for the remainder of her life. Despite being nurtured by her husband, the wife eventually passes away from her illness.
- Starcrossed Lovers: As adults, the man and the woman migrate along with their tribe but at some point, some sort of falling out takes place between two leaders, with the man and the woman being aligned on separate sides. The leaders decide to split their journey, forcing the man and woman to come along with them. Fittingly the chapter this takes place ends with a statue of the man and the woman on opposite sides of two cliffs, reaching out for the other. Ultimately Defied. The following chapter reveals that the man decides to break away from his tribe, sneaking away during the night and braving a difficult journey alone to be reunited with his lover, who it's implied has done that same.
- Temporary Platform: Some platforms will either sink or collapse if you spend too long on them.
- Time Stands Still: In some levels, you are able to outright freeze time so as to fix all the potential platforms in the right position. In others, you will instead be able to fast-forward the flow of seasons until the world is in the best state for the old man to advance. In each case, the degree of manipulation correlates to how long the episode had felt to the old man back when he lived through it.
- Together in Death: After reliving all the representations of the memories of his life, the old man passes on to the other side where he finds his final memory; a statue of his wife and their unborn child, whom he embraces and turns to stone alongside with.
- Towering Flower: One of the worlds has enormous sunflowers many times taller than the old man. He needs to jump through a path made up by their petals in order to advance.
- Tragic Stillbirth: The chapter detailing the time the man and his wife spent preparing for their child ends with this. Especially cruel because the entire chapter is shown to be extremely uplifting until the end.
