When I first played Some Distant Memory about a month ago, I would have said it was like a futuristic point and click version of Gone Home. In it, you play a mech’d-up archaeologist called Zal, who stumbles on an old house from before The Collapse, an apocalyptic event that sent the world into disarray and left only tiny pockets of humanity intact. During the course of its two-hour runtime, you poke around the house, discover old objects left behind by the family that lived there, and use them to reconstruct memories and events from them with the help of your AI robot pal Arora. It’s a sweet story, but it didn’t leave a particularly deep impression on me.
Fast forward to today, when the entire country has practically gone into lockdown, and it’s taken on quite a different meaning. If someone discovered my home 300 years from now, what conclusions would they draw from it? Would they marvel at the mountains of old graphics cards stuck in my office, or would they do a big yikes at the equally tall piles of empty Rennie packets we have strewn about the house? Maybe I should start leaving choice emails and text messages around the place now so that future archaeologists have some appropriate environmental storytelling devices to decipher what happened here…