Flashback 25th Anniversary Edition Review – Switch

I remember playing Flashback on my Amiga, way back in the day. I remember being fascinated by the animated cutscenes and the sci-fi, cyberpunk-ish world that it hinted at. I remember being at once frustrated and fascinated by the lack of guidance and linearity that seemed to be the norm in most games of the time. I remember trying and dying over and over again in vain attempts to master the game and its challenges.

Now, 25 years later, the game has been remastered and released on the Nintendo Switch. The game still sports its iconic animations and cinematic cutscenes with an amazing sense of style and atmosphere. The gameplay is the same. The puzzles are still a challenge to figure out and accomplish. The controls are unique and sometimes frustrating, but are one of the things that give the game its charm. And now, after 25 years, I have another chance at conquering the game that foiled me a quarter of a century ago.

The graphics of the game are polished, but still retain that original style that made them so unique and exciting even 25 years ago. In the graphical options for the game, you are even given the option of simulating a CRT screen effect and signal noise, if you really want to feel nostalgic. I thought the CRT effect was nice, simulating a rounded appearance to the edges of the screen, but I only had the signal noise option on for a short time before it got annoying to me and I turned it back off.

For anyone who is new to the Flashback game, you are playing as a character named Conrad who invented a set of glasses that inadvertently discovered the presence of a race of aliens that were infiltrating humanity called the Morphs. Luckily, Conrad had the forethought to save his memories and give them to his friend Ian, because the Morphs erased Conrad’s memory upon realizing his discovery. You spend the first portion of the game trying to get to your friend Ian so that you can recover your memories and then get back to stopping the Morphs and their attempts at subverting humanity.

The game is a series of platform styled puzzles, requiring you to navigate to various places and obtain required items (key cards, money, energy cells, etc.) in order to continue on your quest. You have to use a lot of forethought and quick thinking to defeat your opponents, because Conrad can’t take a lot of punishment. But your opponents are equally squishy, so as long as you can get the drop on them, combat will usually come out in your favor.

In case things don’t go your way, you are equipped with a flashback device that allows you to rewind time as much as you need in order to give the challenge another try. On the easier difficulty, you have an infinite amount of rewind power. On the higher difficulties, you have increasingly limited amounts of time that you are able to rewind per level. Even so, I never felt like I was too limited by the rewind power allotted to me in the game.

Usually, the challenge comes from just figuring out where you need to go to get what you need to proceed with the storyline of the game. Luckily, there are long-standing and still thoroughly accurate walkthroughs of the game available online to help you if and when you get stuck and aren’t sure exactly what you need to do next. The other big challenge that is sometimes really frustrating is that the control scheme is a bit clunky and cumbersome at times. The way the character moves feels sluggish, but when you get used to it, you just realize that it’s something you have to learn to master and get used to.

Overall, I think that was probably the biggest challenge for me, still, even with 25 years of gaming experience under my belt. This game doesn’t always make the next step in the chain the most obvious thing in the world and sometimes just figuring out what you need to do is enough to stop you in your tracks and make you scratch your head. There are obvious goals, but there is no waypoint system that modern games have spoiled us with to show us where we need to go or highlight the object we need to acquire or explicitly tell us what we need to do with it once we get it. You have to be smarter than the game and figure out those things through trial and error.

In the end, I was really happy to get a chance to play such a classic game again and to see the subtle, but much-appreciated improvements they made to it in order to make it an even cleaner and more enjoyable experience than its original predecessor. I was also glad that they didn’t dumb the game down or add any of those things that I mentioned, because again, those challenges are what give Flashback its charm and enjoyment, as well as that additional satisfaction when you do finally figure the puzzle out and move on.

I would recommend this game to people who are already fans of the original game and newcomers to the franchise alike. It is one of the few games from that period of gaming that has truly stood the test of time and is just as fun and exciting and visually interesting as it was when it first came out.

Author: Brice Boembeke
My first memories of gaming are from when I was 5 years old and my dad got a Commodore 64. It has been almost 30 years and my passion for gaming has only grown. I play a little bit of everything, but am particularly interested in the emergent and unscripted gameplay that comes from open world, sandbox-style online multiplayer games. It is a very exciting time to be a gamer, but I still feel like the best is yet to come. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

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