With My Past Review

With My Past starts off promising with a trigger warning that highlights the psychological effects of playing this game, and for anyone with depression to play it with caution because it does handle some delicate subject matters, including suicide. So, as you can tell, this is going to be a doozy.

While you wouldn’t expect With My Past to be massively depressing with the cute 2D pixelated characters and the admittedly very good soundtrack, I was surprised by how dark it went. The protagonist is a young woman who struggles with depression and wants to outrun the physical manifestation of her past that follows her.

I’ll be honest here: the mechanics used were incredibly fascinating. In the beginning, your past self won’t be too much of an issue. After all, she’s transparent, what can she do? You can press X to interact with objects, C to jump and use the arrow keys to travel back and forth in this little side-scrolling adventure.

Actually, no, saying little side-scrolling adventure makes this sound much more light-hearted than it is. As you progress further, you’ll notice that your past self begins to have more to do to impede you. There’s a delay between you and your past self, and you can press the Z key to interact and eliminate the barriers. However, there are certain green buttons that your past self can push and, therefore, impede your progress. I admit that they were the bane of my existence on some levels.

After contending with the green buttons, some lasers would target both you and your past self. To get over this, you’ll need to time where you and your past self are. When this happens, you just need to get your past self closer to the laser, and they’ll be targeted. Honestly, if I had to deal with this at every level, I think I would have steadily gone insane. But don’t worry, there are other ways to be driven to the brink here.

Pressure pads turn up at certain points, and need something to stay on them to open barriers and progress to the next section. If it’s a dog, you need to stay in the dog’s sight and trick it into staying on the pad by hiding from it or just by moving quickly. Likewise, there will be cats who will follow your past self, but pay no attention to you, so to keep the cat on the platform, you need to get very good at timing.

I’ll be honest, many of the levels were frustrating for me. But then there were the parts that really messed with me. In certain segments of the game, you’ll need to run away from your past self. If you don’t, you’ll die. If you make contact, you’ll die. Then, you need to move super quickly, and the first time, it wasn’t so much of a problem. It’s meeting the past self later and having to kill her, which is the issue.

Oh, wait, I’ve missed a step; you can also kill your past self. At one point, you can materialise her into a physical form by holding the left shift key. When you hold this, you can jump on top of her to use her as a base or allow her to remain on the pressure pad. However, she will still follow you, and when she gets caught in a barrier or hit by a laser when materialised, she will perish for the rest of that section.

Admittedly, it was when I met her for the second time that I had to stop playing. The main difference at this point is that she materialises into a physical form and will have pink hair. You then need to escape her to progress, but you need to kill her to get past an ice block. The only way to kill her is by meticulous timing and ensuring you don’t accidentally clash with her on the way to killing her.

As someone with no patience, I couldn’t do it. It’s not like this is a skippable level, either. I would like to give points to the fact that the hints still allowed there to be a challenge, and that some levels actually had to be skipped. However, it never penalised me for finding some levels too tricky, but other times, it would outright forbid you from going to the menu to skip or get hints.

It definitely made it more accessible, but it was too much of a challenge for me. However, I fully accept this is because I’m not the best at puzzle platformers. I enjoy them, but I can’t handle them well. Plus, holding the left shift key too much ended up causing some kind of ache in my left pinkie finger that I just couldn’t cope with for too long.

With eight chapters split into sections, and a prologue, I have to say that With My Past is an incredibly well-thought-out game. I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it, I just don’t think this was my type of story. Plus, the themes of depression and psychological trauma did mess with me a little bit, but the story was poetic, and the scenery and music were stunning.

Maybe one day I’ll get around to completing With My Past. But, the challenge was a little too much for me. It’s not a long game by any stretch, but due to the themes, I wouldn’t recommend playing it too much at a time. The trigger warning isn’t for show, but if you enjoy heavy themes and challenging puzzle platformers, this might be for you.