Time Hollow (DS)

Many years ago, I was playing Dance Dance Revolution X and one song in particular caught my interest. Since both DDR and Time Hollow were published by Konami, the main theme to Time Hollow was included as well as a video of the opening movie behind the gameplay. Since then I have been wanting to play the game to see what it was all about, and while it certainly took me a while to get to it, I did finally get to see the game such a well produced opening belonged to.

 

Unfortunately, Time Hollow falls into many of the traps of time travel fiction. Ethan Kairos lives a pretty regular life with his parents until the day he turns seventeen. Suddenly he wakes up living with his uncle and learns that his parents somehow disappeared twelve years ago, but this day also happens to be the day he gets a strange device known as the Hollow Pen. When at the right location, Ethan can now open holes to the past, but only if he has the proper level of information on a moment in time. Using this, Ethan could conceivably learn what happened to his parents, but there is a greater mystery in play that demands his attention, a clearly malicious individual also making edits to time. However, things don’t quite start that way, as some of his early uses of the Hollow Pen are related to him pretty much trying to solve any problem he comes across. When another person goes missing he tries to solve their disappearance first, and then people begin dying in accidents unrelated to the main plot, Ethan’s edits tending to save one person only for something bad to still happen that he needs to fix next. Things do eventually become focused on the main plot when the villain becomes known, but the path there definitely takes things slow.

 

Trying to follow the rules of time travel is a losing battle here though. There are definitely some hard-coded rules that never shift like individuals who have a Hollow Pen or have been moved through time are aware of the changes to the timeline, and every time the past is altered you will see some events that have changed because of it. However, the way edits work is strange. At points, it seems like things require a stable time loop where one individual needs to make a change later in the plot to make sure an event from earlier occurs, but at the same time you are constantly interacting with the past by placing new objects in it or altering a certain event. Then there are things that have already influenced the present despite that change being an action you take in the plot later to alter the past to make the present the form it is. It could have gotten away with loose time travel rules if there was a more pronounced plot to focus on or if the game didn’t pull over to try and get you to consider the rules at times, and there are at least a few reveals about altered history that can work as an interesting surprise if you avoid thinking about the logic after. Unfortunately, it seems to lose track of its rules and it makes it hard for the player to keep track of what is possible or not, making some reveals less substantial since it’s easy to get sidetracked trying to figure out how they occurred logistically.

The story doesn’t really have many interesting characters in it either to carry it. Ethan is fairly generic and the members of his friend group might have a single identifying personality trait if they’re lucky, but the game will do things like talk about how different a character is behaving after a time change that doesn’t really have the desired impact since you didn’t know the character before. One of the worst cases is a character named Ben who apparently had a drastic personality change in the past, but if you fix the formative event, he’s not really much of a different character and you never get to know who he was before then. There’s a baffling decision to have most important characters have a number in their last names that almost feels like it is going to be significant but never is, numbers never factoring into the plot in any meaningful manner. There are three decent characters to follow because you do get some time to see them and learn their motivations at least. Your antagonist Irving is a mysterious individual and one whose motivations are revealed at a decent pace to keep it interesting to follow, there is a strange girl named Kori who knows about the time edits somehow and begins seeking you out after you make them, and your uncle Derek is a guarded character whose past gradually becomes important to saving your parents. The game spends more of its runtime with the one-note characters though, but if it had trimmed things down to these three and the main mystery it could have been a stronger experience thanks to the intrigue and drama that comes from their interactions with Ethan.

 

Time Hollow also could have done with a full commitment to being a story-focused title, the story perhaps a better fit for a barely interactive visual novel rather than the weak adventure game it was designed to be. A lot of the game involves going around the city Time Hollow takes place in and finding the right individual to talk to or right object to interact with. The few times you do actively participate in a conversation are pressure-free affairs where a wrong choice means little, but you still need to pick conversational options to get details and sometimes may even need to repeat the same choices to suddenly get new details. Time Hollow doesn’t do a very good job of telling you where to go or what to do at times either, and when more locations are available in the city, it can be hard to find which area or which character might trigger the story progress. There is a girl that sometimes appears near the library who can give you often vague hints, but they don’t update enough to keep you constantly moving forward, leading to too much aimless bumbling around the city.

Wandering around town is a chore and a bore, but when you do get to use the Hollow Pen, you are at least presented with a puzzle. The details you gather from conversations are used to good effect in figuring out what might need to be done in the past to fix the present. It’s often not too complicated though, and some things can require a little too much precision in what change you make. At one point the goal was to give a memo to a character in the past, but if you don’t place it close enough to them on the counter it counts it as a failure. Failing to make the right edit reduces an energy bar that is meant to prevent you from just brute forcing your way through puzzles, but it should never be a worry if you think before you act even when you consider the odd precision requirements. Seeing the ways the world changes after your edit is admittedly an interesting story angle that makes finishing a puzzle more interesting than just knowing you got the correct solution. It is hampered a little by your limited options when making a change, but this part of the game isn’t annoying like doing the interviews or taking trips around town to find out when and where to open up holes to the past.

 

Time Hollow’s plot does pick up near the end despite the flaws in experiencing it, but it also has an interesting alternate story path you can take once you’ve beat it once that, even if you gave allowances to other time shenanigans, doesn’t make any sense despite it being a fairly fun time travel twist. It’s also probably the best example of the game choosing to go for a short term shock or surprise though over telling a consistent narrative, with quite a bit of the game serving as filler between plot twists that carry little weight due to the inevitable reversal of events and the very few developed or interesting characters to be concerned about.

THE VERDICT: The anime visuals and music definitely show a lot of thought was put into Time Hollow, but the effort doesn’t carry over to things like the gameplay or plot consistency. Time Hollow plays fast and loose with its time travel rules and tends to use them mostly for dramatic reveals that barely make sense under scrutiny, and a bit too much time is spent interacting with flat characters rather than the few interesting ones like Kori or the game’s antagonist. The story does eventually give you the motivation to want to keep reading once things finally get rolling, but once you’re there, your actions to push the story forward are still the same as earlier. Time Hollow is about wandering around in the hopes of triggering the right plot progressing moment, the puzzles where you alter the past a bit too simple to justify how slow the game can be or how directionless it can feel.

 

And so, I give Time Hollow for DS…

A BAD rating. Certainly on the edge of being terrible at times, Time Hollow really could fix a lot of its problems if it wasn’t so bloated… or if it had been bloated some more. Many of the actions feel like filler because you are asked to care about the fates of less important characters, and while those moments play a vital role in acclimating you to the Hollow Pen concept, they could have been made more significant if these characters were better established or remained important to the more exciting story that makes up the later half of the game. The bloat that should have been removed was the moments of weak exploration, the constant problem of trying to find the right place to make progress dragging out the experience rather than giving the game interesting activities to participate in. The interview system can be awkward too, and while some players value playing a role in the game they play, here it feels more like the developer included this mechanic without any good ideas on how to execute it. You are investigating as a narrative point but not as the player, the answers you get allowing you to do something new rather than informing how you on how to behave. Altering the past does require you to be attentive to make sure you do the right thing, but it is mostly gameplay there to advance the plot rather than giving the player something engaging to work with.

 

Had Time Hollow committed to a full visual novel formula, then it could have its dramatic plot reveals paced better without having to squeeze in awkward bits of play. The time travel is confusing and sometimes illogical, but the late game dramatic beats that do make this nearly tolerable could be much more effective if you didn’t have to push through poor excuses for gameplay and the less interesting plot meandering needed to get there. Ultimately, this piece of time travel fiction is just far too messy, a problem made even worse by the fact the incident that kicks off the entire plot doesn’t even make sense within its own science fiction rules.