The Great Perhaps (PC)
Perhaps The Great Perhaps could have been great, but if you sit down to play this side-scrolling adventure, you’ll find a game where ideas and execution don’t quite line up. A lot of what The Great Perhaps attempts with its plot, world, and game design aren’t doomed on a conceptual level, but it’s a game that seems to constantly come short in realizing what the game wants to be. Even though it’s rather short at only about two hours to complete the whole adventure, The Great Perhaps drags as it feels like it’s constantly lacking in most everything it attempts.
The first major issue is a rather unexpected but important one. While many video games have poor voice acting, they can sometimes survive it off the back of excellent writing or compelling gameplay. In The Great Perhaps though, our lead character Kosmos is left to carry much of the experience since he is, after all, seemingly the last living human left. The game kicks off with Kosmos awakening on a satellite in orbit to see that the planet has been devastated by some unknown set of terrible disasters, and rather quickly he tries to instruct the space station’s onboard AI to cut off oxygen so he can go down with the planet. However, this dramatic overreaction to his initial shock is delivered with the same practically bored tone he’ll use for almost every statement he makes across the game, and when he heads down to the planet in search of any remaining life, his voice actor continues to let down almost every attempt at an emotional moment the game goes for. Kosmos’s poor line delivery ruins the major revelations and story segments that could have had more weight if he was simply an unvoiced protagonist and we were left to imagine our own voice for the character, the vocal performance sounding too much like a passionless script read rather than someone attempting to embody a character.
The other major character in this journey comes out a little better because of her nature as a digitally voiced AI. L9 is wired into Kosmos’s suit as he heads down to the planet, and even though her path to becoming more than a mechanically minded consciousness begins right as Kosmos wakes up, she undergoes a remarkably fast and unearned personal evolution. While the gradual humanization of an AI isn’t a new idea, the incremental growth you would expect for a mind with almost no emotion to undergo to become more personable feels like it is rushed, L9 having a few moments where she comments on how she’s happy that Kosmos has done something morally right or helpful and then suddenly able to outdo him when the pair get to musing on matters of human nature and philosophy. Her nature as an AI makes it easier to swallow her limited ability to emote as well, and she’s unfortunately more along for the ride rather than given a greater focus. This means our astronaut lead is often the one who is left to react to plot turns and thus most attempts to depict the true bleakness of this post-apocalyptic world or have him find a spot of hope in it come up as flat as his line reads.
Putting aside the underwhelming voice acting and the characters hurt by it, The Great Perhaps reveals its core gimmick pretty quickly, Kosmos coming across a lantern in the ruins of the world that he can use to enter a point in time before the end of the world. The areas he traverses can now be experienced in both the unfortunate present and in a moment before things fell apart, and rather than trying to warn people of the impending doom, Kosmos’s first instinct is to try and reverse the fate of his family. The adventure becomes about searching out where they were in this point in the past, alternating between the two periods of time to open up the path forward. This sidescroller ends up rather similar to a point and click adventure in that regard, in that much of the progress will be tied to properly figuring out how an area’s puzzle can be solved with whatever objects can be found in the area. You don’t have a traditional inventory though, the player instead lugging around any interesting objects in hand, and calling the roadblocks to your progress puzzles can sometimes feel a little generous. There are some legitimate puzzle elements like setting up the paths of circuits in a minigame, but many points feel more like you’re just grabbing one of the few available items and moving it to its proper place, the player not needing to really think much on how they’re interacting with the area they’re in to proceed.
The game attempts to make its item delivery puzzles a bit more than just moving an object from Point A to Point B by having time travel enter the picture, but alternating between past and present is a superficial means of trying to make it feel like something was actually done. One aspect of the lantern that doesn’t come into play as much as it should is the ability to see a slice of the other point in time before flipping over to that version of the location, this being important for avoiding hazards like subway cars that will flatten you if you pop over at the wrong time and knowing if there is a safe place to land in once you do the time swap. This is used for one puzzle in an interesting manner where you spy on a man in a different time period, but for the most part, it is just your means of trying to make sure you won’t die after a time swap, and it’s not even that effective at doing so. This comes down mostly to the flaws in time travel here, as spending time in the past is always restricted to a set amount of time that isn’t indicated by a timer. This can mean you’ll be swapped back to the present at unfortunate times, such as when a large mole creature is patrolling the area you’ll be landing in and is able to immediately kill you since you didn’t have the time to escape its reach. You might end up popping back to the present in what looks safe until the game determines you weren’t quite out of what it considered dangerous rubble or the range of that wide open pit, and the game killing you for that can lead to you having to slowly walk through the area to get back to what you’re doing in the hopes it won’t happen this time around. Many segments of the game are made hard just because some aggressive human in the past or strange creature in the present requires a time swap as they head towards you with deadly intent, and if the other period of time isn’t safe to swap to, you’re just going to have to accept the annoying setback of yet another death.
More bothersome is when the game just outright doesn’t work as intended. There’s a portion of the game where a bank robbery is happening in the past, and while the solution to it is immensely underwhelming, when I tried to carry off their explosives and had to put them down since you can only carry one item at a time, it ended up glitching and moving a few centimeters out of Kosmos’s reach, and since his movement is locked to a 2D plane, it was lost until I reset the chapter. Another chapter had to be reset when I was in the greenhouse and the spray can I was mixing ingredients in was placed right below an ingredient bag. Any attempt to interact with the can would now instead lead to Kosmos grabbing more ingredients from the bag, so a reset was required to make it even possible to progress. Even if these issues didn’t exist the actions you perform would still be far too basic and the dangers that crop up during them frustrating since they often pair poorly with the time travel or move so fast you’ll die if you linger near them for even a second.
Flipping between past and present is represented well with the shift from the desolate devastated cityscapes to places packed with life and color, but the story certainly feels like it putters out. Too much of the adventure is about little hubs like a carnival, zoo, and city street with its related businesses that just boil down as areas where you determine which of a small selection of objects needed to be carted between the two time periods, but even when it’s asking you to figure out which of a set of items is important, it’s not very difficult to do so. There are chases involving a large shadowy figure who you need to outrun, but beating it is just a matter of making sure you do the only things available as you run. Near the end the game does at least whip out a new mechanic where waves of time can force you to pop between past and present against your will or move objects between them itself, but it’s no more difficult for it since you can still use your lantern to adjust things how you like. All in all, it’s pretty hard to point at an idea that was done justice in The Great Perhaps, too much of the experience dry item deliveries and a poor realization of its time shifting mechanic.
THE VERDICT: The Great Perhaps attempts many ideas with its time travel story and pretty much fails with each one in some way. The time travel gimmick is shallow due to artificial limitations, avoiding annoying deaths is often just about swapping to the other period of time instead of finding some interesting workaround, and puzzles are usually just about grabbing one object and taking it to the right place. The terrible voice acting of the lead character undermines the game’s attempts to extract emotion from its post-apocalyptic narrative, his dull attitude infectious and dragging down the plot’s few moments where it could have been decent. Packed with too much time walking about slowly and flipping time periods just to perform unengaging tasks, you can at least be thankful the game is very short so it can only spend so long squandering its ideas.
And so, I give The Great Perhaps for PC…
A TERRIBLE rating. In isolation, The Great Perhaps’s elements could be done well, but the implementation of them here just leads to a snowball effect of problems. The fact you can only carry one item at a time lead to the glitches and slows down a game that can feel rather slow already. The time swap forcing you out of the past after a while doesn’t really seem to ever have any relevancy to the puzzles and mostly just throws you over to the other side so you either die from being in a bad spot or can immediately swap back to get back to work. The activities you’re asked to engage with are often just item delivery puzzles made a bit more complicated by having a simple tile-spinning circuit minigame affixed to them or having some pointless items scattered about to mess you up if you didn’t realize they were red herrings. The story is probably the closest to succeeding despite the bad voice acting and the rushed development of L9’s character, but its structure is still rather simplistic and really needed the extra touch that good line delivery could add to moments that are otherwise too basic in their writing to really resonate with the player. More true puzzles similar to spying between time would spice up the gameplay and break it away from its unambitious mold, a bit more love given to the writing could help lend some of the intended emotion to the story, and some better performances could help realize that better script were it to exist. However, this side-scrolling time-swapping adventure really doesn’t feel like any of its ideas were fleshed out beyond the basics, and with the injections of cheap danger and technical problems on top of those, there’s very little interesting to latch onto during a player’s time with the game.
While it didn’t seem to be trying to innovate with its concepts, The Great Perhaps also feels like it had no plans for the ideas it put forth. The adventure is mostly a lot of walking through areas that are just the way to the relevant locations, puzzles put in your path but not even packing a punch because they barely ask for any intelligence to solve and mostly find their difficulty in the issues with how the game places deadly impediments. The execution of the game design and story concepts feels like it’s constantly half-baked when its not outright flawed, and while it’s not always a constant barrage of its worst problems like the glitches or annoying deaths, those moments where things are closest to working are instead boring because they don’t pack the substance you’d hope to find in your play experience. The Great Perhaps ends up as a batch of ideas that wouldn’t necessarily be flawed in the right context but lacks the degree of thought needed to develop these concepts into working parts of a greater game design. The Great Perhaps ends up a game about what could have been had some more thought been put into realizing its ideas.