Have You Played... Dead Synchronicity - Tomorrow Comes Today?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

What an opening. Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today [official site] begins so well. In fact, after the Spanish trio sent us the opening a year before the final game, I was extremely excited.

And then it didn't really work out. What had begun as a post-apocalyptic tale told from a microcosm of desperation and helplessness, eventually descends to the point of seeming to end mid-sentence, nothing resolved, as if it just got fed up of existing and died. But gosh, if only it hadn't, because this obsidian-dark tale of gruelling survival, agonising death, and genuinely upsetting situations, is almost brilliant. The puzzles, however, are not. The game is structurally poor, and contains rather too many broken leads, or abandoned threads.

But despite it, it remains fascinating. It's so grim, but with a tiny glowing light of hope. The art is beautiful, and the writing is often great. We thought it was going to be utterly incredible, and in the end it's actually not that good. And yet remains something special, and developers Fictiorama, should they be able to continue, are a team I'm enormously enthusiastic about.