I remember being fascinated by Another Code: Two Memories when I first saw it in the pages of Edge magazine back in the early 2000s. An oddball DS game was always something to pay attention to, but this was one in which the main character had their own DS inside the game too. Or rather, they had a DAS, an in-game gadget that just happened to look exactly like that gorgeously angular first design of the DS. “Is it product placement when it's your own product being placed?” asked Edge, or words to that effect. New worlds and new wonders. I miss the early 2000s.
If my memory is correct, Two Memories came out at the start of the DS's lifespan. Now, it's back with us, to bust the Switch off to his own personal Gray Havens. I've been playing the new remake this week and it's been a real journey. There's loads it turns out I've forgotten, loads that I suspect has changed, but there's one thing that has remained absolutely the same.
Before I get to that: Another Code: Recollection combines Two Memories and its sequel, R: A Journey into Memories, which was previously only released in Europe and Japan and came out for the Wii. Both games have been thoroughly reworked for the Switch. I knew that a DS game from 2005 or whatever would need some tweaks, but as far as I can tell, both games have new graphics and a new control scheme. As far as I can tell – I've played all of Two Memories in the new collection, but I'm still early on in R: A Journey into Memories – they've been given new puzzles too, and while the narratives seem to follow the same beats, there's been a little quiet reworking to keep things sweet.
This is mostly, I suspect, because Recollection essentially combines both games into one big game. You can't choose R: A Journey into Memories from the title screen at first, you have to work your way through Two Memories to get to it. And a lot of work has been done to join the two games so they feel even more like separate chapters of the same story than they already did. (In putting them together like this, incidentally, something really interesting occurs: Ashley, the white-haired teen protagonist, ages in between the games. She's an early teen in Two Memories and a rather more (justifiably) grumpy older teen in R. Seeing characters not just aging but changing like this is a bit like spotting a shift in the weather in an open-world game. It doesn't happen much, and it gave me pause.)
Anyway, both Another Code games are narrative puzzle games, or point-and-clicks, or, more accurately, visual novels with a bit of gentle puzzling and exploration thrown in. This genre blend kind of blew my mind back on the DS – I couldn't fully get my head around it. Now there are a lot more games around to help contextualize what the developer Cing is doing – not least other games by Cing, like Hotel Dusk, which I really must play again at some point.
Two Memories sees Ashley turn up on Blood Edward Island to search for her missing father. She quickly befriends D, a local ghost, who is trying to regain memories of his life and death, and then twin narratives unfold as they explore the island and its mansion together and slowly make sense of it all. A: A Journey into Memories picks up years later and is set in a tiny lake resort in the wilds, with a camp ground and a weirdly memorable town theme that plays in the local store. Like Two Memories, it's another mystery about remembering things and making sense of the past in a way that slightly redraws your understanding of the present.
My main memories of the first game was that the puzzles were often little more than excuses to do stuff with the DS' unusual inputs. Lots of dragging things around and turning cranks with the stylus. These were playful interactions as much as brain teasers, there to space out the plot and provide a bit of rhythm and ritual. They reminded me of the process of turning the page as you read.
The puzzles have changed, as far as I can tell, but they're still very much the same kind of thing. Where I once had to turn the crank on a drawbridge, I now have to find a bit of wood and place it across a gap to reach the other side of a river. There are mechanisms to interact with, gentle puzzles to crack, and lots and lots of doors to unlock.
These puzzles are fine, I guess, but they aren't the real point. Neither, I'd argue – and I'm going out a bit deeper than I should here – is the story, which is engaging and soapy and secretly a bit silly, filled with coincidences, revelations about the true natures of characters and double- crosses. It's played super serious, which is extremely likable, but if a door opened at some point – or slid back into a wall following a hidden button being pressed – and Doctor Drake Ramoray from Days of Our Lives walked through, I wouldn't be hugely surprised.
What is the point? I think it's the sense of place that both games have. Another Code, even in the early 2000s, was a very slow game: Ashley walked slowly, conversations unfolded slowly, puzzle animations took their sweet time. In 2024, it's often glacial. But while things are happening so slowly, the island and its mansion started to really take hold of me. Dark hallways where you hear the sound of footsteps and can rattle the handles of locked doors. Dirty afternoon sun strobing through the crystal gems of a chandelier. Another Code is full of this stuff, and full of the joy of this stuff. It's like bunking off school and heading into the countryside for a day. It's Dark Towers.
Actually, maybe the plot, oddball as it is, does matter then. Because the plot animates the characters and gives them the heroes their yearnings and their openness. And it gives the villains something surprisingly diabolical to animate them. And it makes the island from the first game in particular feel like a place alive with mystery. So many little things contribute to this, I think – the simple, colorful graphics, the cut-scenes that shift between environmental detailing and the faces of characters, rendered huge in close-ups, even the DAS, reworked here as a kind of Tron -era Switch, and allowing characters an extra frame within the frame of the game, their own window on the world and its plots. But mainly it's the pace, so slow and studious, each new piece of information settling in, each new location filled with what Pynchon always called “its fine chances for permanence.”
These are fascinating games, then, and they've been treated pretty well in this unlikely reimagining and reissuing. I'm enjoying my time with them – a few slow hours at the end of each day. A melancholic and nostalgic way to unwind.
#Code #Recollection #pleasures #games #quickly
