Yesterday

My first impression of Yesterday was confusion: the cartoony, cel-shaded art style that Pendulo carried over from the Runaway games sits in obvious tension with a story involving torture chambers, ritualistic murders, and homeless people being burned alive in New York City. That dissonance never fully resolves, and critics at the time noticed it too. But once you accept that Yesterday is essentially a dark graphic novel wearing a cartoon's clothes, the package becomes a lot easier to appreciate on its own terms. You swap control between three characters across the game's chapters: Henry White, a wealthy philanthropist investigating the disappearances; his blunt, oafish friend Cooper; and John Yesterday himself, an amnesiac cult investigator piecing together what he did before an apparent suicide attempt left him with a Y-shaped scar and no memories. The story globe-trots from a grimy New York subway station to Paris hotel rooms and eventually Scotland, layering in ancient conspiracies, alchemical symbols, and a villain whose identity the game hands you surprisingly early, trusting the why to carry the suspense. It does, mostly. The plot delivers regular twists and withholds just enough at each turn to keep curiosity alive, and the three-way ending where you choose which character resolves the story is a genuine highlight that gives the finale some actual weight. On the puzzle side, expectations need calibrating. Pendulo deliberately simplified the challenge here, and the inventory-based puzzles are almost always intuitive to the point of being obvious for genre veterans. There is one standalone chess-move puzzle and an early sequence where John reassembles clues he left himself in a Parisian hotel room, but neither will stump anyone for long. A hotspot highlight key removes any pixel-hunting frustration, and a tiered hint system that forces you to attempt a solution before unlocking help keeps the handholding from becoming outright spoon-feeding. The game is also impossible to lose, with an automatic scene-based save system that lets you replay any chapter from the menu. Pure puzzle fans looking for a mental workout will be bored; people who want story delivery with minimal friction will be content. The production holds up reasonably well given the tight budget the game was made on. The hand-drawn backgrounds use light and shadow well, moving through a blood-splattered torture chamber, a cheerfully unsettling mental hospital called Happy Dale, and assorted European locales with consistent atmosphere. Voice acting is competent if uneven, and the lip-sync has been called out by basically every reviewer since launch, so do not expect that to have aged gracefully. Runtime is honest: somewhere between three and eight hours depending on pace, with most players landing around five. That brevity is the single biggest complaint in the critical record, and it is a fair one. The story has the ambition of something twice as long and occasionally feels like it is sprinting past its own reveals. Who is this for? Point-and-click fans who prioritize atmosphere and narrative twists over puzzle density, and anyone who liked Broken Sword or Gabriel Knight's globe-trotting conspiracy structures but wants something darker and shorter. Hardcore adventure players who measure a session by the number of times a puzzle legitimately stumped them will find Yesterday thin. It earned a nomination for excellence in storytelling at the IGDA Awards, and that framing is accurate: the story is doing the work here, the gameplay mostly just stays out of its way.

Alex · Scout Team

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