Everyone can empathize with staying up late at night and sitting in agony as your mind forces you to relive a painful, embarrassing, or heartbreaking moment. Our past is with us forever, and how it manifests in the present is a toss-up from day to day. With My Past, the first game from developer Imagine Wings Studio, it tries to combine those feelings with platforming-puzzle gameplay and does it very well. The result is a therapeutic five-hour adventure that I’ll be thinking about long after today.
After waking up from her past at 3am, a nameless blue-haired girl embarks on a journey through her labyrinthine mind, which is holding her back. This translates into six distinct chapters of gameplay, each with a unique theme in narrative and mechanics. The first introduces you to his “past,” the through-line mechanic with which My Past shines. Your past is just you, but two seconds ago. If you walk forward and jump, two seconds later, this will also happen. In my early moments with my past, the fun builds on it as it teaches you the ropes, but by the end of the game, I was making moves that bent my mind in all directions.
As you progress through each chapter, new mechanics are introduced with My Past, such as the kiwi fruit that allows you to teleport to your past location or to stabilize your past and reach new heights. Provides a way to climb over it. It’s hard to describe how unique this mechanic is in playing With My Past because it’s truly unlike anything I’ve ever played in a puzzle game, but Imagine Wings Studio offers new depth at every step of the journey. Excels at adding layers. I’m reminded of 2018’s Celeste, which does the same thing by adding narrative elements to the game’s mechanics.
On that same note, With My Past is more ambiguous than the cellist’s journey of transformation and self-love, rather than allowing players to inscribe their own past onto the protagonist here. But it works well. As the on-screen words that drench the story in self-loathing, the way our pasts surface at the worst times, and sometimes feeling lonely even when surrounded by love, I found myself thinking about my own past. Found thinking, and it was amazing. See how My Past suggests dealing with these issues through gameplay.
Your playing past turns from a mysterious specter, to an enemy on the hunt, to an ally that you must understand and understand as a part of. And that’s when With My Past delivers one great puzzle after another. A handful of the 150+ challenges left me more frustrated than satisfied, but the skip option allows players to progress the story. My only real dissatisfaction came in the game’s final (and only) “boss” fight. Maybe I missed the point, but in an otherwise cohesive experience, it felt disconnected from everything I played.
Devoid of voice acting, with a minimal soundscape coloring the main character’s footsteps, it resonates with my past scores here, and the result is one of my favorite scores of the year. It’s gorgeous, clean, and feels more at home in a movie theater than coming from my desktop screen, but the game’s music is just as integral to the journey as the story and its puzzles.
I started with my past on a whim yesterday and finished it later this afternoon with a pained smile on my face. That “so good” kind of smile. With My Past is a short but powerful burst of emotional storytelling on top of excellent and intuitive puzzle design. Despite some shortcomings, it’s an inspiring reminder of the power of games and how savvy developers can weave storytelling into how we play.