The Gap (PC)
Déjà vu. That odd sense that you’ve somehow seen the present events in the past, this quirk of the human memory is a strange phenomenon indeed, but in the narrative adventure game The Gap, déjà vu has quite the unusual explanation. According to it, when a person experiences déjà vu, they are actually experiencing a brief intersection of two different timelines as the exact event plays out across both. This bit of science fiction sounds like it could be used for some electrifying dimension hopping set-up, but instead it is merely the means through which we travel through the life events of Joshua Hayes, a man desperate to prevent the terrifying loss of mind and memory that can come from very real neurological disorders.
When the story starts, we don’t have very many details on what is happening and that absence of information is clearly intentional. The Gap is a game about Joshua trying to find a cure for the real world ailment that afflicts his family, but to prevent the loss of memory, we must first reconstruct it. In this first-person narrative adventure you wander around small locations as Joshua, looking for documents, photos, and objects that can help to reconstruct memories and grant you not just windows into past events, but help you step into other timelines with their own information to share. While technically you will be viewing the lives of alternate Joshuas through this method, most of what you learn feels like it is meant to be applicable to our viewpoint character, and it does stand to reason that two different universes eventually having similar enough events to trigger déjà vu would be fairly similar in general. The actual scientific explanation for this doesn’t feel too crucial to puzzling out the broader narrative, the player learning about Joshua, his wife Amber, their daughter, and events that both humanize them and start granting us the information needed to piece together some cure for the disease.
Joshua is a bit of a strange lead at times though. On one hand, he’s nearly perfect for the role, having studied neurology in college so it feels reasonable he could come across some solution to this problem that has evaded science for so long. Additionally, the game is set in the near future but in a believable way. While we do get some windows into the past, the present seems to be in the 2040s and mostly it has seemed to impact life in small ways like smart mirrors and digital pads on doors rather than anything outlandish. Technologies like nanomachines or electric vehicles have advanced a good bit, but when wandering around your apartment, viewing memories of dates, or witnessing Joshua talking with his friend Chris, we see a familiar world rather than one that is defined by its differences. While Joshua comes off rather harshly in the opening moments, the windows to the past do start to show the pressures of his work and how he’s fallen quite far in his desperate bid to find a way to prevent the looming mental decline that threatens those he loves. We get to see Joshua’s inner thoughts, and while he maybe is a bit too much of a wisecracker in the past, we can come to understand him better even when he’s almost undermining sentimental moments with his behavior. While it would be nice to see some more genuine heart in those scenes, they are also crucial in showing Joshua as a man who has always been an anxious, pessimistic man, the very same kind of person who would latch onto the long shot idea that déjà vu is a possible portal to other dimensions. He is right about that for the sake of this story, but when we see the more emotional and social detriments that come from this mad pursuit, we can at least say we had seen this part of him even during those key moments where he grew close to his future wife or considered having his daughter.
The plot of The Gap can still achieve its emotional impact despite Joshua sometimes robbing a moment of a touch of its drama, there still plenty of genuine and important scenes to uncover that make you care for this small family because we get moments to establish who they are rather than just situations meant to aid with your ongoing investigation of a cure. Joshua believes the only possible way to cure the illness in time is essentially to find an alternate universe where it’s already been dealt with, but it’s hardly so easy. As the player you need to poke around the alternate versions of the apartment, the setting fairly similar across timelines but there are pronounced differences that help you get a good picture of what his life was like across different points in his history. The memory windows where you can enter new places help a lot with adding some location diversity, especially since they’ll often include additional tasks that make them almost like a quick puzzle. Whether it’s making sure you pick out the right pet bunny for your daughter, figuring out how to eavesdrop on Amber and her friend discussing her diagnoses, picking the right airport terminal, or piecing together the order of events, The Gap’s puzzle moments are often tests of how well you picked up information as you search. They also come with an interesting choice in presentation, the player able to hear the fully voiced interactions but people are rendered as featureless forms, these fading memories almost denying us a good look at our principal characters but photos around the home can fill us in on who people are just as if we were someone struggling with such memory issues.
Usually poking around every corner of the small apartment will eventually let you find everything that’s vital, and it can feel almost like a detective game at times, the player gathering important details from the environment that they later use to uncover new crucial bits of info. Having whatever observations or documents are available is different from properly applying them though. Some elements will be a bit straightforward, once you know what the bunny looks like you can easily go back to that memory and find it for example, but others do require a good idea for detail or retaining important information for a later interaction. The Gap even manages to make a neurology exam into an effective puzzle, the player able to look over Joshua’s notes and textbooks but helped along well by highlighting and other ways of presenting information. More importantly, the focus on information like ideas of brain chemistry and potential treatments as parts of puzzles keeps that information fresh in your head. You don’t need to know the deepest scientific details, but you can piece together a growing understanding instead of it feeling necessary to dump a thorough explanation of concepts onto you. The Gap’s story is more compelling because you are trusted to naturally scoop up vital information as part of smaller interactions, and since the game is only a few hours long, it works as a good experience to play in one sitting so you can keep it all fresh and better make the vital connections to uncover the truth.
The game’s end won’t just be handed to you either, as you do need to actually connect the dots to see it to its conclusion. Whether the ending might satisfy is another question, although when viewed as a more metaphorical reflection on ideas of memory and how a person with or without them can feel like two different people, there might be some more to the underlying message before you start considering what it might also mean for Joshua’s personal growth or the price of progress. If you are worried the information might be tough to manage, there is at least a sort of “home base” timeline where everything of considerable importance will be pasted on a wall for you to look over. It makes hopping between dimensions easier as well and even shows when there are missing bits of vital info that you’ll need to go back for. So long as you don’t jump out of a timeline and into the next one before you’ve had a thorough look around though, it’s unlikely you’ll miss much and there’s never a barrier to reviewing important memories or details. The investigation might not go perfectly smoothly if you overlook a clue for a particular information puzzle, but your work does feel primarily contained to figuring out important details with any interactions outside of that format being simple things like properly cooking food, and even that has a set of helpful timers so it’s more there to keep you busy during an conversation.
THE VERDICT: The Gap is an information puzzler, the protagonist’s fight against memory loss defined by the need to pore over the past to make crucial connections and uncover new vital details. Despite the sci-fi idea of hopping through memories in parallel dimensions, it manages to mostly remain a personal story where you are given the emotional details to hook you alongside the information needed to open up new paths in your search for a cure. Most of the puzzle solving is tied to knowledge gleaned from what you find, this more about piecing together the narrative than solving conundrums, but the way the story is divided has a knack for hooking you in with new revelations or more intimate looks at the lives of its key players.
And so, I give The Gap for PC…
A GOOD rating. If Joshua could let some of the heartfelt moments play out without cracking jokes, we could have got the type of emotional narrative that could elicit some stronger reactions from the player, but beyond just how it feels like it is an important element to establishing him as the anxious individual who would chase a mad means of finding a cure, it’s not like it prevents the player from getting invested. There is still a clear tragedy at the heart of this, a fear of that loss of self that can come from your mind deteriorating. It may not go as far as some stories about memory loss or related illnesses, but it doesn’t go for easy sentiment either. We’re coming into this story as it reaches a feverish last ditch effort to find some way to prevent a future of cognitive decline, and in some ways an information-focused puzzler feels apt for the subject matter. If you can’t remember some vital detail when it’s needed you can feel that bit of frustration, and even though you can consult some clue to that info somewhere nearby, it is a reliance on an external representation of the memory rather than one held in yourself. The ending might be the point where it gets most interpretive though since it’s not as nice a wrap-up if viewed purely for its surface level conclusion, but it’s not a finale that wastes the build-up and you can feel your emotional investment tugging at you in those last moments even if it hasn’t quite built itself up to be a tearjerker. It is a bit tempting to recommend deeper puzzles or ones that perhaps test logic or deductive reasoning, but the reliance on knowledge tied to Joshua’s life feels like a very intentional piece of the design and diverting too much away from that core would lose that crucial thematic focus. Broadening what the information clues can be would perhaps be the better approach to make the problem solving more robust, although there are already moments in the adventure where you will feel clever because you properly spotted details that might not have been so obviously highlighted or apparently crucial.
The Gap deals with a heavy subject with a careful hand despite the focus being on curing a real disease, and it even throws on some commentary on the dangers of trying to leap into applying a promising treatment without proper caution. Tying the gameplay elements to remembering what you’ve found is a smart way to reinforce the stakes and put you in the protagonist’s shoes at points where your memory fails you, but it also does this without announcing that’s the reason you are solving puzzles the way you do. It keeps its focus strong, The Gap a memorable game if not quite at the heights of being truly unforgettable.