Epanalepsis Review

Posted on 12th June 2015 by

Developer: Cameron Kunzelman

Publisher: Mastertronic

Platform PC: (Steam)

Release Date: Out Now

A rarely used word in the English lexicon (or any lexicon for that matter), a dictionary definition describes ‘Epanalespsis’ as:

To lessen confusion, examples of this rule may include this:
“Next time there won’t be a next time.”
(Phil Leotardo in The Sopranos)

Or this one, present in Pirates of the Carribean, believe it or not:

“The man who did the waking buys the man who was sleeping a drink; the man who was sleeping drinks it while listening to a proposition from the man who did the waking.”
(Jack Sparrow, The Pirates of the Caribbean)

Though it is a rarity of a word, epanalepsis does actually occur in speech and writing quite often.

English grammar lesson over, let’s get to the review!

Epanalepsis is a point-and-click narrative focused game, which travels across three different time periods. Developed by Cameron Kunzelman, developer of Catachresis (another big complicated word that happens more often than people realise), the game has three chapters, each of them incredibly short. In the first chapter, we encounter Rachel, the first character. She’s dreaming, finding herself back in 1979, in a place familiar to her in childhood; however, it is distorted by a figure in a red hood speaking to her, before the dream ends abruptly.

When she wakes up, it’s 1993 again, and Rachel has things to do.

As the player, you get to carry out the delightful task of escorting Rachel to the bathroom as soon as she wakes, and other menial and ordinary tasks.

After kicking around her apartment for a while and interacting with various objects, we get Rachel to head to the bar (slowly but surely), where a bar tender will tell her someone called Tony is looking for her. After meeting Tony, Rachel is asked to meet under the shop with no sign. After the ensuing conversation, Rachel is convinced Tony is a “whackjob”, and to her surprise (but not ours), Tony does a weird thing and vanishes, leaving poor Rachel behind in a state of confusion.

Despite its mundane activities in the first chapter, it is apparent that the story is anything but. The next two chapters, set 20 years apart from each other (1993, 2013, 2033), places different characters in the different eras, with vastly different stories, but with similarities appearing throughout. There are a few moments of choice for the player in each chapter, though even they are rare. The results of these choices are clear to the player however, even before making the fated choice. No matter what choices are made, the same cycles are repeated, which hark back to the game’s rhetorical title.

Obscurity, weirdness and clever writing about abstract themes, usually stuff that I like and enjoy, falls short of a good execution in Epanalepsis. While I could usually plod on through a poorly executed game if it interested me enough, this game failed to grasp my attention, or my imagination. It comes down to numerous factors, but ultimately it was a poor delivery of what could have been a great title.

The 8-bit art style, while successful in various other indie games of the last few years (Gods Will be Watching, Dead Pixels, Papers Please) fails to deliver the impact that the story deserves, thus underwhelming and bland, and while the story is completely narrative driven, (with no puzzles, maps, hidden areas, inventory, or any of that kind of stuff), the narrative alone isn’t quite enough to draw me in. Add in a few typos that escaped QA and writers, and you get a narrative that seems like it does its best to kick a player out of sync with the game, which can grind some gears where players are concerned.

Disjointed and broken story-wise, like many of these styles of games, it requires multiple play-throughs in order to garner some understanding, if any can be gained.

However, struggling through a second play of a game that wasn’t enjoyable the first time around is an unenviable task.

Other nuisances in the game include it being difficult at points in the game to determine which character is talking, name tags being absent in dialogue boxes –adding a new layer of confusion where it’s definitely not needed. The weird and frustrating save system which really isn’t needed due to the game’s brevity (saving is done by pressing CTRL), no in-game menus to adjust settings/volume/etc., and sometimes a total freeze out (on my computer, anyway) make for a bad experience overall.

Despite the great soundtrack by John Fio, which was crippled by the shortness of the game, even that couldn’t hope to fill the hollow feeling I got while I played through.

I wasn’t expecting a full explanation of the events at the end of the game, and I wasn’t to get one either. The game as a whole feels like an unfinished work, a prototype – especially the… minimalistic ending, which seemed to be tacked onto the end as an afterthought. Rather than a game, Epanalepsis could fare much better as an interactive story/visual novel, or something similar.

Epanalepsis, while at first seemed to have great merit, became far too flawed too quickly to enjoy, and could have definitely done with some more time in development. Some may call the developer’s style unconventional, others might say pretentious, but if you’re curious about this title, you can find it on Steam for €5.99, as well as DLC, sold separately, that consist of the soundtrack and Developers logs.