YMMV / Gadget: Past as Future

• Awesome Art: Although the character models in Past as Future look primitive by today's standards, the rest of the artwork from the designs of the world and objects to the atmospheric lighting still capture a feeling of isolation and uneasiness that permeates the entire game, and it has a unique blend of liminal Art Deco influences and psychedelic imagery.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • In one unsettling Easter Egg that many players are unlikely to find, after opening the door of your hotel room, walking as far as you can without leaving the room, then turning around, you'll find one of the scientists, Charles Reif (the one who handles the hotel's Sensorama) having appeared suddenly in the room, sitting in a chair, surrounded by fog. It can make for quite the startle if you're not expecting it. If you get up close to him, he says something to the effect of "It's okay. There's no activity here", and then he disappears after you turn around again. Considering that this happens at the very start of the game before you're even given your mission to track down the scientists, and that you're supposed to meet Charles, who doesn't bring this appearance up with you, later at the Museum of Science, there are many potential implications to be had. Is the Charles Reif in your room a Sensorama hallucination? Is this a flashback your character is having? Is this the "real" Charles momentarily reaching out to you while the other Charles, and by extension the other characters, aren't real? Interestingly, at one point in the final act of the game when you're travelling with the scientists on the train, you see Charles in the back with the Sensorama where he repeats the same line as in the beginning, and in this context, he's referring to the Sensorama being turned off and that no one is looking for them, though it's uncertain what that means for the overall story.
  • In Invention, Travel, and Adventure, one of the encounters with the boy involves him slowly twisting his entire body like a pretzel, deflating to the ground like a balloon, and disappearing. Considering that this version of the game has The Reveal of Slowslop and the boy being the same person, seemingly the only reason for this happening is that it's Slowslop intentionally screwing with the player character, though since Past as Future lacks that twist, the scene doesn't carry over.
• Nightmare Fuel: The odd lighting, sparce decoration, and zombie-like expressions of the characters have led some reviewers to call this game a "nightmare".
• Signature Scene: Slowslop announcing the arrival of the mothership above the Earth as orbs of light from the giant Sensorama cascade around him. It first appeared in a page of Inside Out with Gadget, then was put into the redone cutscene with Slowslop in Past as Future, for which the scene also provided the European cover art, the English DVD cover for the movie Mindscapes; and finally, part of the cover for The Third Force.

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