Your Future Self Reviews

The reviews are quite harsh. It's a short game, nothing groundbreaking but a good time nonetheless

[i] Note: If bright, flashing colours or patterns cause problems for you, look elsewhere. It is constant throughout the game, and the option to turn off flashing only removes a portion of it. [/i] This is an interesting little game based mainly on strategy and partly on chance. The game does give you options for what to say, with each having a different response, however, this does not lead to different endings or story lines, there is still only one path to go down to progress the game. So if you are looking for an RPG text adventure where you can choose your own path, this is the wrong game. You will need to strategically pick how to respond based on what your 'future self' is feeling. While you can be fairly accurate, it is still up to chance whether or not that response will be the correct one, so a response with a 90% chance of working could still fail. The looping mechanic is a big part of the game and is how you progress the story. Admittedly, it did get frustrating when the game made you replay parts of it over and over to get small pieces of story, but it was not a deal breaker for me and leads to some interesting interactions as you remember what happens and your other self does not. The story has a few big twists and turns, making you question yourself and the other people at almost every turn, which made me enjoy going through it despite the lack of real choice. Though I wouldn't call it 'mind bending' and certainly not personal as the Features claims, as it gives specific details that, obviously, won't be true for everyone. My curiosity about the story and a need to complete what I started made me enjoy this game a lot. So while I wouldn't say it's for everyone, if you are looking for a short, entertaining story which requires some thought and [strike] a lot of [/strike] patience, you would most likely enjoy it too.

I'm disappointed in this game, because I feel like it didn't use the 'future self' concept very well. There were a number of situations where the future self mentioned specific information about the past self's life that, of course, is completely different from my own life. I feel like the writing could have been different to allow for those incongruities. Instead of the game's twist, which I felt fell flat, I was hoping the story would play on the idea that the future self may not be me at all. I'm not refunding the game, because I really the style it has, and you can tell the developer put a lot of work into it.

I love the concept of this game, and it executes it wonderfully with its beautiful twists and turns, just a shame that the whole mechanic of "looping" can get rather infuriating at times and that it's rather linear [spoiler] which I find quite ironic, considering the fact that it's all about breaking linear time, but fitting to the idea that you can do whatever you want in the time loop and it'll just keep resetting until the desired outcome. [/spoiler] I absolutely adored every second I spent with this game open, ready to immerse myself in this world. The only thing I enjoy more than talking about the concept of time is a story-driven game, and boy howdy does this thing tell a story. One of my main complaints is that autosave locations are a bit hard to predict, making it hard to know where I'll have to pick back up when I sign off for the day. Maybe a little icon in the corner would solve this issue. Just something little, but not big enough to take you out of the moment. Credit where credit is due, this soundtrack fucking slaps HARD. I find myself humming "revelations" or sitting there with "convince" stuck in my head. I believe I purchased this looking for a story-driven game, and this popped up in my recommended. Definitely worth the few bucks, and I suggest buying it even if you're simply considering it. 8.9/10

WARNING: If you have epilepsy or migraines, DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME. There is *no* proper epilepsy warning anywhere. And it really *is* bad. Despite turning off the scanline and screen jumping, it keeps turning itself back on. And there must be a bug, because sometimes even when you turn it to "Off", it keeps going. And there are entire scenes where you're trying to read text over an intensely-flashing/strobing background -- and this is unaffected by the scanline setting; there is no way to disable this. Contortionist Games Developers: Please, please, add a setting to the game to turn off the flashing background when whoever it is interrupts the sessions. I'm sure this is a great game, but it's unplayable right now for a lot of people who might otherwise enjoy it.

This took me about 70 minutes to beat, and those 70 minutes were very well worth what I paid here. The story is told in a creative manner that leaves you asking questions to the very end, and the dialogue system, while simplistic, holds up well for a short game like this.

A neat little time travel story that's marred by some really bad screen flickering and the like. No really, team, this was very, very bad. Tone down the blue flashing screen or turn it off entirely. And put up an epilepsy warning while you're at it. I can't in good faith recommend this until you do.

Wow, just wow. Playing this was intense, despite me not even really understanding the gaming side of it. It's not important, though. Put on your headphones, make sure nobody's gonna enter the room for at least two hours, better turn off the screen tearing stuff (it's distorted well enough without this option) and immerse yourself. I won't say more than you'll be talking to your future self about... stuff they did. I shouted a curse to the developers when [spoiler]the game quit to desktop due to me not wanting to condemn what my future self will have done[/spoiler], but it was a positively excited curse, so bear with me. The game ran flawlessly on my Linux system.

This game doesn't make anything easy for itself. It takes difficult theme (time travelling sci-fi), superdifficult narrative means (psychologizing argumentative conversation), and adds experimental gameplay with rpg elements. Yet somehow still manages to succeed. Mainly thanks to good writing - it does feel quite natural, without forced or awkward moments and similar usual suspects of eyesrolling. I was interested the whole time and even enjoyed fiddly, but functional-enough mechanics. And hey, it's text based adventure with epic boss fight!

This game is extremely infuriating. This game’s main mechanic is “looping”, where you slowly progress down a dialogue tree until you either restart or try again. A neat idea, if it actually was a dialogue tree, when in reality, it is just a dialogue hallway. There is no real choice through the entire game, and the core game mechanic is just choosing whatever “tone” you hadn’t used recently, and failure to pick the correct tone results in wasted time. The fact that the failure to pick the correct tone, or simply not having enough points in a tone results in the need to reset the entire loop again is stupid. It creates the illusion of difficulty by wasting the player’s time while not asking for skill or trying to entertain the player during the wasted time. The worst part about the game is that it is supposed to be about "having a conversation with your future self", except you don't have a conversation, you just read about someone else having a conversation, since you never get to actually choose what you want to say, you can't even pick the tone you want since the game will just fail you and reset until you pick the "correct choice". The fact I had to redo the end chapter 5 times because one of my “stats” wasn’t high enough is ridiculous, because why shouldn’t it just skip the already seen dialogue? In games like Hollow Knight or Dark Souls, failure is part of learning the game and the enemies, so you can slowly see yourself getting better with every failure while other games like Fallout or Divinity use failure to mark an area that shouldn’t be visited until you are high enough level. In a game, failure should exist to either create a barrier for the player until they are ready for the rest of the content or serve as a wall to be chipped away as a show of growth and challenge, here it is just used to waste the players time. The game also has an issue with its story, which is to say it is lackluster. It makes for a good 5-10 minute read, and perhaps backdrop for some good gameplay, but without any good gameplay, the story is left alone to hold up the game, and it isn’t enough. Having me re-read the story 2-3 times doesn’t make it any better. Overall, there isn’t much to say about the game. The time loop idea is pretty neat, but it is executed poorly, leaving an overall hollow experience not worth the hour and a half I spent playing this.