The point and click adventure crowd has seemingly found a new home on the DS. While the genre continues to melt away on the PC, great titles such as the Phoenix Wright series and Hotel Dusk: Room 215 have found their way to our stylus-tapping handhelds. Unfortunately, for every great title there needs to be a couple of stinkers to keep balance in check, and the latest stinker is Time Hollow—a game which sounds spectacular in theory, but is executed poorly in practice.

The game revolves around Ethan Kairos, your average, angst-ridden, “I have issues” teen. Just before his 17th birthday, Ethan’s father tells him he has something important he wants to talk about. Unfortunately, the next day Ethan wakes up and finds himself stuck in some sort of alternate timeline where his parents vanished 12 years ago and he lives with his mooching uncle. Oh, and he finds a pen called a “hollow pen” which can rip open the very fabric of time itself.

Ah, to be young again!

With his newly acquired hollow pen, Ethan sets out to figure out why time changed as it did, and to ultimately figure out what happened to his parents. Possibilities of owning a pen which allows you to view alternate times be damned, because Ethan is only going to use it to set things straight and make the world a better place. I suppose there must be a law in Japan that their high school boys who come into great power can only use it to do extreme evil or extreme good, but that’s beside the point.

Even though the possibilities of such a pen could lead to a much more inviting narrative, the premise is still entertaining enough in its own way. Sadly, the gameplay is nothing like the unique plot and results in a possibly unique and entertaining game becoming a static and stale one.

Like most adventure titles, Ethan’s main task is talking to other people. Unlike most, though, the game is extremely linear and restrictive. While you may figure out where to go next, the game won’t let you until you’ve talked to X number of people to gather the information. This makes the core gameplay revolve around traveling to different places on the map, clicking on as many people as possible to talk to them, and then doing what the game tells you do to next. It plays less like an adventure game, and more like an interactive piece of pulp fiction—which wouldn’t be a problem if most of the interactive characters weren’t so bland.

Once Ethan knows what to do next, your goal is to travel to the next spot on the map and start digging (with your pen, naturally) to open a rift in time. Digging will allow Ethan to view an event in a different place in time, and either put something there or take something out in order to alter the course of history. This is done by tapping and drawing circles around certain spots in the portal, a task which is almost entirely hit or miss. Thankfully, when you’re near the right spot Ethan will pipe up alerting you to the fact, so there’s almost no challenge even in what should be the most brain-straining portions—if you’re right, you know it. If you’re wrong, you know it and try a different spot.

It truly is the story which carries Time Hollow. The gameplay itself is shallow, overly repetitive, and offers no challenge that a six year old couldn’t overcome. The only way to “lose” is to dig too much, but even that can be averted by simply tapping Ethan’s cat in order to regain life. If you’re in the market for an entertaining 7-8 hour mildly interactive story, give it a go. If you’re looking for a fun and challenging point and click adventure game, you’re better off opening a portal to your future and putting that copy of Time Hollow back on the shelf.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .