When you grow up reading sci-fi and fantasy as a kid, you’re going to be dealing with time travel. For me, it was the full course: The Time Machine, Doctor Who, Bradbury’s A Sound Of Thunder, Lieber’s Changewar stories, Back To The Future, Steins;Gate – there have been lots of ideas on the subject which have been plugged into my head. So when Decade popped up on the radar, I figured I’d give it a whirl and see where it went. So far, there’s seems to be a lack of movement.
Decade puts you in the shoes of a child who has led a group of other children to a hidden bunker. There used to be a lot more of you, but now there’s only four. The bunker is probably the only safe place in a world which has fallen apart and will be completely devoid of any life in a few centuries. It also contains a working time machine. From the instructions, it can be used to send one person back in time for a period of ten years, and requires the subject to return to a certain spot before that decade is officially up. Being the smartest of the bunch, you figure that if you can work out where it all went wrong, you can change the past and maybe make a better future. Also being the smartest of the bunch, you’re the only one who can work the time machine, which means the other three kids get to play temporal pioneer.
Visually, Decade is very much low-fi. The portraits of your explorers are heavily pixelated, though they do seem to age organically. The UI is also low-fi, highly stylized, perhaps a tad clunky in spots. It works, it just doesn’t feel as smooth as it could be. One particular pain point was the various items and reading materials your explorers pick up during their probes. The ability to properly examine them seemed broken for a long time. The FMV sequences for the various endings I’ve seen so far are well shot and staged, but adhere to the aesthetic. Text is clearly written and easily read, and you’re going to be reading a lot of it. You’re not going to be seeing a lot of flashy effects, really. This isn’t that sort of game.
From an audio perspective, Decade feels like it could have been a lot stronger. There’s some “Simlish” for when you’re talking with your explorers, which works well enough. There’s some heavy synth music, but no particularly memorable or standout pieces. Some leitmotifs for when you’re talking with each explorer would have been a good touch, particularly if certain elements were added in based off the characteristics they obtain over the course of their adventures. Much like the visual aspect, super-tight foley work and sound effects aren’t necessarily something appropriate for this game, and the developer clearly recognized it.
The gameplay in Decade is an incredibly mixed bag. The mechanics are simple enough to pick up as it’s pure point-and-click. You have three people you can send back in time, each starting with a “Determination” and “Sensitivity” value, reflecting their ability to drive through to a successful conclusion or their ability to pick up on various nuances in social dynamics. You start to explore earlier periods, gathering up information, artifacts, and possible ways to change the timeline to something less terrible. It’ll probably mean a return trip to a particular period, and the one who just scouted it out isn’t necessarily the one you’re going to send for something more involved.
All of this is pretty simple in theory. It’s the execution where everything goes completely pear-shaped. It feels like a lot of the options either aren’t fully implemented, or they have such little impact as to be functionally useless. You have no reminders or indicators of how you handled things in a previous run, which would have been a valuable quality-of-life feature. You also have very little in the way of control over saves. And in certain circumstances, that becomes a serious issue. Decade relies primarily on autosaves. You do have three slots for manual saves. When the game crashes (which it does with more regularity than I’m comfortable with), it will go to the last autosave. However, if your last autosave is in the odd position where you cannot reach an ending state (yes, this really happened), you have to delete all of your saves, manual and autosaves, and restart. And the lack of a definitive “game over” for when all three of your explorers have died (very likely from old age) just feels like a completely avoidable oversight.
The narrative elements of Decade do a lot of the heavy lifting in the game, and they’re just as hobbled as the mechanics. As you talk with your explorers, even before you send them through the machine the first time, you’re teasing out bits and pieces of the story leading up to your time in the bunker. You get the sense that you were having to make some very hard calls at a very young age. Yet the circumstances of those prior events don’t seem to reflect the changes that you make. Everything seems to based in the events surrounding the original unaltered timeline. More to the point, your persona in the “present” age isn’t getting older. Meanwhile, your three buddies are getting older in ten-year increments that happen from your perspective to be only a few minutes. And after a few trips back, you just sort of stop talking to each other about anything other than the timeline changes (or lack thereof). A few trips more, and you seem to run into a dead end about where to go next. You’re given vague opinions that you might be able to change the timeline in another way, but nothing which would legitimately qualify as a hint. If anything, you’d expect your (now much older) companions to offer actual ideas instead of deferring to the tween running the time machine.
There’s no lack of ambition to be found in Decade. The premise calls back to the early Infocom adventure A Mind Forever Voyaging, along with classic sci-fi works in the subgenre. It’s the execution where things fall apart, which disappointing but also not entirely unexpected. Even really good time travel stories are hard to get right. With a good bit of elbow grease and some major debugging, Decade could turn out to be one of those good time travel stories. It’s just not one right now.
Axel reviewed Decade on PC with a provided review copy.
