Trace Memory was one of the DS's most prominent titles in its first batch of software. Playing it years later, it's both easy to see why it garnered interest and easy to see why it never really got a big following. With a sequel slated to hit the Wii soon, I found it was a good time to finally experience this early piece of DS software.

Trace Memory is a point-and-click adventure game made by the same people who created Hotel Dusk, a game that basically took the main concepts of this one and polished them a bit. Players assume the role of Ashley Robbins, a 13 year-old girl who travels with her aunt to a mysterious island to find her long-lost father who disappeared a decade ago. Ashley ends up in the middle of a plot to foil, though there are twists along the way. While some of these twists are genuinely interesting, they can be a bit overplayed. This is partially due to the fact that Ashley herself does, in fact, play her part as a young girl just becoming a teenager, and thus can be naive and childish at times -- to her credit, she can be kind of charming in this way, as she is a distinctly flawed character -- though I'm sure many older players could find her to be just plain annoying. This is all to say that Trace Memory doesn't shy away from some subtle references to more mature themes, but it doesn't quite mature itself enough to really deal with them as much as Hotel Dusk does. It's a Teen-rated game, but it definitely seems geared more toward younger teens than older ones.

There's a lot more one could say about Trace Memory's mostly competent narrative, but its main strengths and weaknesses lie in how it's all presented. For starters, the touch screen usage feels extremely basic and unrefined -- puzzles which require interactivity often feel unresponsive and stiff. On the flip side, other puzzles require some interesting thinking outside of the usual box and take advantage of various functions of the DS. Fortunately, no puzzle concept is really ever used twice. Likely a result of that very fact, Trace Memory is a relatively short game, assuming one can figure out its puzzles in a reasonable amount of time. This isn't necessarily bad, since the game would definitely outweigh its welcome were it to last much longer than it does. Naturally, some puzzles are more creative than others, some solutions more obvious than others, etc. The overall mechanics feel a bit lacking in polish, however -- something that Hotel Dusk shaped up on.

The visuals are also kind of bland all around. That said, the character art is interesting and colorful in the right places -- Ashley's rosy cheeks and pale white hair are nice touches which make this relatively ordinary child stand out. One of the problems is that, while the game's dialogue uses some expression changes, it's just not quite enough to really bring the characters completely to life in the way that Hotel Dusk's brilliant sketch-animation did. When there are cinematic scenes, they feel too slow, bogged down here and there by flashing between unnecessary shots and generally just lacking a dynamic layer of action that is certainly possible in still pictures.

One aspect that is to the game's advantage is that while walking around, players can only examine areas that contain something of relevance -- the scene will zoom in, and players can poke around to discover what specifically interesting element(s) they are supposed to be looking for. This cuts down on a lot of unnecessary shuffling through empty X's and Y's. Another mechanic is the employment of D, the ghost of a child that was about Ashley's age when he died -- a subplot through the game is finding objects and clues to help D recall the events that led to his death and thus enable him to "pass on." This metaplot helps give some more incentive to explore areas and also serves as a way to really give some engaging context as to the environment Ashley is traversing.