Back in the old days, in the time before fancy graphics, licensed soundtracks, ESRB ratings, and ultraviolent gore-o-ramas, the idea of a video game was linked explicitly to the text adventure. Heck, even the genre name itself pays homage to that first and most influential of games, ADVENT (or "The Colossal Cave Adventure"). Games back then focused on telling a story and challenging the player to solve a mystery. While the genre eventually grew up into point-and-click adventures like Shadowgate and Myst, that core of storytelling has always remained solid. Nintendo has sought to prevent players from forgetting the feeling of reaching the end of the tale.
Trace Memory is, as you might have guessed, a point-and-click adventure in the vein of Deja Vu or Maniac Mansion. Players take the role of Ashley Robbins, a young girl who, on the eve of her fourteenth birthday, is summoned to the not-ominously-named Blood Edward Island to discover the truth about her father, a supposedly dead researcher. Accompanying her is her aunt, Jessica; once they set down on the island with no greeting, Jessica goes off in search of someone. When she doesn't return after hours, Ashley decides to go exploring. That's where you come in. Guiding Ashley through the polygonal island (from an overhead view), you must find Jessica, unravel the mystery of the island, and solve three murders along the way. And all roads lead to that spooky mansion on the hill...
The game gives you some help in the form of a device known as a DTS. This familiar-looking gizmo (it's shaped like a DS) has a few interesting functions, including a digital camera and a card reader. Throughout the mansion's myriad rooms you'll find DTS cards that offer solutions to puzzles or background on Ashley's father, Richard. Most are hidden, but some are obvious and thus required to progress the story.
Moving through the mansion is no easy task, either. Doors are locked with Victorian keypads and sometimes inscrutable puzzles. You'll have to be very clever to solve them all, as some solutions require you to think outside of the context of a game. Need to fog up a window? Blow on the microphone! Need to break a bottle? Tap on it with the hammer you found! Granted it makes solving certain puzzles needlessly complex, since you know what you want to do but can't quite figure out how to translate it into something the DS would understand. Still, given a choice between having all my commands put in front of me at once or getting the opportunity to be clever on my own, I'll take the more creative route.
Trace Memory suffers from the one thing which makes all adventure games risky propositions: a lack of replay value. Put bluntly, it's short (my first run through, even with being stuck for a while, took me just under five hours) and it can only be played through once. Twice if you're an obsessive completist-- the game throws another truth seeker into the mix with the presence of D, an amnesiac ghost who is searching the island for the answer to his own murder; to solve his murder you must trigger all of his repressed memories before the final showdown. This was something I really didn't like, actually. During the course of the game it is very easy to piece together the truth of what happened to D, even with an incomplete set of his memories. However, there's no such thing as "close enough"-- even if you yourself know the killer, the game stubbornly refuses to resolve his case if you leave even one of his memories locked. More than that, the game doesn't tell you how close you are to piecing everything together until it's far too late to go back and clean up.
The graphics alternate between decent polygonal models for the exploration sequences, nice-looking prerendered backdrops for close-up investigations, and excellent hand-drawn cels for conversations. Never once is something outright ugly, which makes sense given that the mansion was a nice place. Ultimately, however, the graphics take a back seat to the gameplay; it doesn't matter how pretty a room is if you've seen it a thousand times and can't figure out what to do next. The music and sound effects are uninteresting, which is just about the worst you can say about them-- they're not bad, just not good, either.
Looking back, it's easy to see that the DS was made for adventures like this, but I'm sad to say that unless they get better, we're going to see the point-and-click genre die out again. Trace Memory gives old-school gamers something to be excited about-- but only for a little while. I can see a lot of players becoming very disappointed by this game after they blitz through it in half a day, then wonder why they paid $30 for this. Still, it is worth a rental if you liked games of that ilk back in the day.
