Another Tomorrow review

The first Glitch Games release I played was Veritas, so now with completing Another Tomorrow I'm starting to get a sense of their house style. It seems that no matter the setting or concept, these first-person puzzle adventures in the vein of The Room will always have their share of abstract, obtuse, and occasionally unintuitive challenges that practically force you to rely on their robust (and handy) hint and photo systems to carry you through to the end. This is to say Another Tomorrow feels very much like games that came before, and if you're at all familiar with the Glitch Games catalog, you'll know what you're in for.

Chasing the past

In Another Tomorrow, you play as a man with a pretty hazy memory in search of answers. All you really know is some tragedy has happened and you want to find the person responsible for it so you can get revenge. To get direction, you'll need to rely on your own wits to gather clues and solve puzzles that string you along to various locations that take you closer and closer to the truth.

The way you go about doing this is through what I'd comfortably refer to as classic first-person mobile adventure mechanics and conventions at this point. Like Agent A, or The House of Da Vinci, or The Frostrune, or any of the aforementioned The Room games, you tap around on largely static and uninhabited environments collecting clues, gathering items, and solving puzzles. When it comes to Another Tomorrow, these locations are somewhat disconnected, making each locale feel like its own, distinct puzzle box.

Capturing memories

Aside from distinct locations, Another Tomorrow also features some of the same useful puzzle-solving tools that have appeared in their other games. You have a camera and can take pictures of puzzle hints and solutions that you can whip out onto the screen so you never have to memorize anything or take screenshots yourself and swap between apps. There's also an in-game hint system that cleverly updates itself with the most relevant next steps you should take and allows you to simply look at answers if the hints don't seem to help.

In theory, this should result in a pretty frustration-free experience, though consulting hints only to find solutions that don't quite line up with the clues provided, or suggestions to try things you would have never otherwise thought of can deflate your interest in trying to puzzle things out for yourself later on in the game. That, and the camera's limited photo capacity that forces you to manage what you take photos of and delete pictures after you no longer need them, are unwelcome kinks in what are otherwise supposed to be features that enable smooth progress through the experience.

Unnatural surroundings

My biggest problem with Another Tomorrow is how its puzzles are contextualized within its world. The game has you moving between realistic-looking environments like a motel, a bar, airport, etc. but the challenges hidden within these environments feature such odd mechanisms and objects that they feel like exactly what they are: arbitrary gates that you have to find a metaphorical key for to move forward. In this way, your progress in the game rarely feels like an investigation. It's more like a level-based puzzler where the pieces for solving each puzzle are hidden in random locations.

This seems to be the Glitch Games way of puzzle design, as I noted a similar experience playing Veritas. In defense of Another Tomorrow, the puzzles here feel a little more manageable thanks to how the game is divided into locations, but you'll still encounter things like a decorative plaque with rotating discs that activate a secret compartment if you line them up with the bullet hole patterning on some shooting targets outside of a custodial room of an airport. Part of me was hoping these surreal and odd puzzles would somehow be explained by the game's story, but that--disappointingly--isn't even attempted.

The bottom line

My feelings on Another Tomorrow are complicated. From a distance, all of its individual components are solid, make a lot of sense, and I'd like to see them replicated in other games. When you start bumping up against their limitations, though, they become frustrating, and Glitch Games seems determined to make sure you get to that point. I think your mileage may vary here depending on your own adventure game puzzling acumen as to how much this could grate on you, but for me Another Tomorrow feels like a marginal improvement over the studio's previous attempts at this kind of game.