What Never Was Review

Developed by Acke Hallgren on the Unreal Engine 4, What Never Was is a short free to play title available on Steam. It's popped up in my recommended feed a few times over the last month or so. With that in mind, I decided that I was curious enough to install and try it.

Here are my thoughts.

The Story

The story follows Sarah, a woman who's working to clear out her late grandfather's attic. She finds a tape recorder with a message for her which talks about certain secrets that the old man kept from her and her mother. The message ends with her being tasked with finding certain things and experiencing whatever it was that her grandfather was talking about herself.

This is a great concept that we've likely all seen before at some point or another. When it's done well, we get an interesting story with likable characters and loads of entertainment value. To answer the obvious question: yes, this game does a good job with the concept. Adding to that, we have something that's almost a hallmark of these types of stories: puzzles.

Yes, this is a puzzle game where you collect journal pages and solve puzzles to progress the story.

What Did I Like?

Well, first off; I really liked the concept - like I said before. I also thoroughly enjoyed the visuals and the music. The sound effects and music come out of royalty-free databases like YouTube's music library which makes sense considering that the game is an indie title.

The voice performances for Sarah and the grandfather are great. It's rare that I want more of a character based purely around their voice but this is one of those cases.

Regarding the puzzles, I found them to be very engaging and a lot of fun to work with - although, I will admit that they were much easier than I thought they'd be.

What Didn't I Like?

There was actually very little that I didn't like about this game. That said, the fact that you're in one room with, admittedly, very little to do does make it a bit of a bore eventually.

The controls were fine, but they were a little bit stiff - I should note here that I was playing on an older laptop so it may have just been my hardware and not the game itself.

One of the biggest problems that I have with this game is the way the game ends. The reason for that is that it just ends. You solve a puzzle and that's it. Game over. Sarah's final line basically says that she experiences her grandfather's adventure but that:

"That is a longer story for another time."

This isn't a problem in terms of hooking an audience. I feel like there's enough to keep an audience interested. On the other hand, with working through the game only to have it end on a cliffhanger may leave some players feeling slightly...cheated.

My Overall Impression

The overall impression that I got, and this may be a little unfair, is that this was an experiment of sorts. It feels very much like a demo to present at a festival and say:

"Hey, look what we've got coming!"

That's kind of good but it's also kind of bad. It's good in that it shows what you can do with limited resources and a lot of creativity. It's bad when you consider that a game you work through for 30 to 40 minutes doesn't have a solid ending. The ending is literally the end of a Dragon Ball Z episode; you kind of expect a second installment to start off with a narrator re-capping the previous episode.

With all that said, we come to the big question: is it worth playing? Personally, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. The few problems I had weren't really so bad that they took away from the experience - like I said, it could've been that my hardware was older. Ultimately, I think you should at least give the game a try and see how you like it. Like I said at the start of this review, What Never Was is a free-to-play title so if you like it then great. On the other hand, if you don't like it; then you haven't lost any money.