Simpler Times

My first instinct when I loaded Simpler Times was to rush it. Old habit. But this is a game from stoneskip, a Transylvania studio making their debut, and they built the whole thing around the idea that rushing is the wrong move. The entire experience takes place inside a single childhood bedroom, seen in first-person, across four seasons that span a decade of protagonist Taina's life. You never walk anywhere. You look, you click, you lean in close to things. That constraint sounds limiting until you realize the room itself is doing the heavy lifting, and it earns every quiet second it asks of you. The structure is clever and understated. Playing a vinyl record on the turntable in the room is how you move between time periods, which makes the act of cuing up music feel genuinely ceremonial. You lift the needle, flip the record, set it back down. It is a small ritual, and the game knows it. The lo-fi soundtrack composed by George Pandrea anchors every scene, and Taina's voice actor Maeve Kroeger contributes lyrical poetry woven through the score. When the music and the ambient narration line up at the right moment, the effect is quietly devastating. The soundscape here is doing the kind of work that most narrative games outsource entirely to cutscenes. The interactivity across each season is light but purposeful: painting, birdwatching, photography, building a birdhouse from a dot-connecting wood-cutting puzzle, assembling a diorama, collecting girl-guide badges. None of these will challenge a seasoned puzzle player, and that is by design. The birdhouse sequence is probably the most demanding thing in the game, and it fits because it mirrors the patience the story is asking you to practice. A scrapbook-slash-journal nudges you toward the next meaningful object without feeling like a quest tracker. Where the experience stumbles is in its controls and its lack of transition clarity. Picking up objects with a mouse can feel fiddly, items drop if your aim is slightly off, and more than a few players have accidentally advanced the season by playing a record before fully exploring, locking themselves out of collectibles with no warning. That friction is real, and it chips at the meditative calm the game is otherwise building with care. Who this is for: anyone who loved Unpacking's object-as-biography storytelling, anyone who replays certain albums on grey afternoons for reasons they cannot fully explain, anyone who has stood in a childhood bedroom about to pack it up and felt time compress in a strange way. If you want mechanical depth, agency, or a game that feels like a game in the conventional sense, Simpler Times will feel insubstantial. Its interpretive structure means the story lands differently depending on where you are in your own life, which is either its greatest strength or a frustration, depending on your mood. At roughly two hours, it knows when to end, and that is a quality more games should aspire to.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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