Hindsight Critic Reviews

Tackling tragedy in games is important, but doing it well requires empathy, awareness, and a deft hand. Hindsight takes an important story and makes it relevant and relatable by scaling down its narrative to a quiet, personal level. Hampered only slightly by a few design choices, its masterful blending of art, music, interactivity, and writing make it a subtle triumph and a story well worth being told.

Hindsight is effective with its emotional intentions, powerful in its storytelling, and light in its interactivity options. You may not play this more than once, but the impact of the game’s purpose will resonate for a while.

Hindsight offers a look into a life that could very easily be one of our own. It’s a glimpse into a very personal subject that many people can relate to and handles it with maturity and grace. As a game, it offers a short, bittersweet ride that might be too costly for some. But as an ‘experience,’ it delivers satisfying emotional catharsis and is a poignant reminder that we don’t always know the whole story regarding our friends and family.

Hindsight is not your average narrative adventure. From the visuals, resembling the incompleteness of personal memories and rememberings, to the sound, vibrating during the whole story with perfectly cadence rhythm, everything here feels methodically thought through. And that is not something you see everyday in the contemporary video game industry.

As its name suggests, Hindsight is a fascinating journey in a story of memories and self awareness. With its touching soundtrack, the experience is a delicate way of telling us a story of an ordinary person in an ordinary world, and this is what makes the game so close and relatable.

As this game invites us to reconsider our relationships with loved ones while they're still around, the benefit of Hindsight couldn't be clearer.

The story is excellent, the art is fantastic, and a lot of people are going to relate to its message. However, if you’re going into the game thinking that it is going to be the next big breakout indie of the year, then you might come away a little disappointed.

Hindsight is a short and compelling adventure about memories and identity. When mechanics, storytelling and rhythm blends together, Joel McDonald's game is brilliant and gives wonderful perspective about our relationship with our past and with the people we love. On the other hand, the sleek and very keen mechanic which the game is based on, sometimes feels like nothing more than an aesthetic exercise and some bits of the game are less entertaining and meaningful.

As a game, Hindsight doesn’t fully deliver. Its interactions are clunky, inconsistent and occasionally annoying, detracting from what really matters here: the narrative. But that narrative alone is so poignant and beautifully told that it’s worth pushing through for. This isn’t a story that’s going to blow you away, excite you or even uplift you. Real, complex grief is a difficult subject to broach, but Hindsight deals with it masterfully. The raw human emotion captured here makes it worth the journey – and, just maybe, if you’re grieving yourself, it might validate some of your own emotions.

Hindsight is an interesting analysis of the ways we can play with memories via the use of objects that symbolise important aspects of our lives. The game’s mechanic that allows players to explore the protagonist’s memories and piece them together will be something that most will connect with as our memories shape the way we see the world. However, it is the pace of these memories that lead to frustration and a disconnect from the story. The narrative, though beautifully written, is constantly repeating itself and becomes tiresome pretty quickly. Hindsight is an aesthetically beautiful game with fun and thought-provoking gameplay that unfortunately lacks in its narrative execution.

Hindsight tries to tell a very deep story full of thoughts on the past and the future. Unfortunately the gameplay is too minimalist and the short duration fails to enhance its merits.