When The Past Was Around

My first hour with When the Past Was Around felt like sitting in someone else's living room, going through their drawers, and slowly understanding why all the clocks had stopped. That's the texture Mojiken Studio nails completely: a hushed, surreal domestic grief that communicates entirely through hand-drawn scenes and a violin-heavy soundtrack, with not a single line of dialogue or text to hold your hand through the emotion. The mechanical core is escape-room puzzle work spread across five chapters. You click around rooms - flipping rugs, opening drawers, counting butterflies in a garden to decode a combination lock, or working out a piano melody from clues scattered across connected spaces. The inventory is minimal (drag an item from your pocket, use it somewhere logical), and a hint button can highlight interactable objects if you feel stuck. Puzzle difficulty sits deliberately low: Mojiken made the call that the story should never lose to a pixel hunt. A few obtuse moments creep in anyway - one or two cross-room solutions require backtracking that briefly breaks the spell - but the majority of the puzzles feel purposefully tuned to the emotional register of the scene they sit inside. Later chapters, as Eda's world gets more fractured and frantic, even change how rooms feel to navigate. That's quiet, intentional design. What the game IS, really, is a portrait of grief as a set of locked rooms. Eda is a young woman processing the death of Owl, her anthropomorphic violinist lover, and the whole structure - moving from memory to memory through mysterious doors - treats the past as a place you can visit but not stay. The art by Brigitta Rena is completely hand-drawn, warm autumnal colors giving way to cooler, darker palettes as the story tilts toward loss. The soundtrack, composed by Masdito Bachtiar, leans on recurring violin and piano themes that resurface throughout the chapters in ways that feel genuinely earned rather than cosmetic. There are also brief interactive musical moments where you pop floating notes off the screen to contribute to the backing score - small touches, but they pull you in. The honest criticism is that the story, told without words, leaves some players cold. The two protagonists are deliberately sketched rather than detailed, and for anyone who wants character depth or narrative payoff with explicit answers, the game's openness to interpretation can read as thinness. The runtime (under two hours for most players) also means that some reviewers finished it wanting one or two more memory vignettes to deepen the emotional hit before the final scene. The no-replay angle is real: once you know the ending, the puzzle layer alone won't pull you back. But here is what I want to say clearly: When the Past Was Around is one of those games that knows its own size. It does not waste a scene. The hand-craft in every room - coffee cups, washing lines, beach ice cream stands, cemetery stonework - is meticulous in the way that only a game made by people who cared obsessively about a small thing can be. The Steam community has sustained an overwhelmingly positive response for years since its 2020 launch, which for a two-hour indie is a statement. If you have ever lost someone and tried to figure out which rooms in your memory you are allowed to enter anymore, this game will find you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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