We're checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.
I'm a sucker for any story about the bureaucracy of death. Show me a bunch of ghouls in line at the celestial DMV and you'll have my rapt attention. I was immediately on board with The Rewinder, a point-and-click puzzle game from MistyMountainStudio, based out of China, and, appropriately enough, inspired heavily by Chinese mythology. It's on Game Pass, but as an unassuming point-n-click thing you could easily have overlooked it even if you've been subscribed for years.
You are, pretty much, a spiritual detective enlisted by the bouncers at the gates of the underworld to figure out what's stopping Death's books from adding up. There's some kind of spiritual blockage at a cursed village preventing some poor soul from dying properly. The gig is to figure out what's up and put a stop to it.
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I don't trust myself to assemble the circumstances that led to a whole village being cursed at the best of times, but your job is made all the harder by the fact the hamlet is essentially devoid of people but chock-full of resentful, uncommunicative ghosts. You'll have to use your wits to actually figure things out. And by 'wits,' I mean your long-unflexed puzzle game muscles that you haven't used since Monkey Island 2.
Because, really, I have to admire how thoroughly The Rewinder is an old-school 2D adventure game. You point, you click, you solve puzzle after puzzle to progress. You spend a solid 15 minutes staring at a stumper of a problem that requires you to do third-grade maths, you give up and Google it. The whole classic experience is there, toe to tip.
For instance, one early puzzle asked me to make use of an old, impressively complex weighing scale to figure out the code to a combination lock. I had a bunch of weights—four of which bore symbols corresponding to digits on the lock—and had to figure out the mass of each. The first couple were easy: just stick 'em on the plate and muck around with the balance until you get everything perfectly level.
The last two required you to add other weights and then do exceedingly simple calculations to figure out how much your marked weights, uh, weighed once you'd sorted out a balance. Unfortunately for The Rewinder, I'm a moron (I sure didn't become a writer because I had a mind for maths), so I just looked it up.
All this to say that the puzzles don't feel like makework, at least not to my addled brain. They make actual demands of you, which is refreshing in a world of game design where puzzles have started to feel like momentary distractions the devs throw in to break up long stretches of hitting guys with an axe.
But the real meat is in the rewinding. Hence, the name. Your spiritual superpower is that you can delve back into past events as a ghost and subtly change things, gathering up "senses"—the smell of a fresh-cooked meal, anxiety about some rickety construction, that kind of thing—and plant them in people's minds to affect their decision-making. When a monstrous ghost trapped me, I could head back to the moment her husband made the fatal decision to leave her home alone—prey for the village monsters—and nudge his thinking into taking her along instead, which had dramatic ripple effects on the future. Think the Crack In The Slab mission from Dishonored 2, but 2D and with less stabbing.
No less pretty, though. Say what you will about pixel art, The Rewinder makes it sing, and puts its best foot forward too. The game opens with an almost swaggering display of scenes from Chinese mythology rendered in absolutely gorgeous splashes of colour, and it never really lets up.
All the ghosts and ghouls you run into feel well-designed and creepy—though I admit they might just be quite straightforward representations of creatures from Chinese myth I don't know about. Regardless, I very much enjoyed looking at them, and the beauty of the game's surroundings were a kind of balm whenever I ran into yet another puzzle that reminded me how ill-equipped I am for the adult world.
Be kind, rewind
So consider this my recommendation. I've taken a look at quite a few obscure—or relatively obscure—games recently, and I think The Rewinder is my favourite of the lot so far. It's so slickly made and smart that I'm surprised I've not run into any die-hard fans on my trips around the internet. But hey, maybe you're the wellspring from which that die-hard fan community pops up, in which case you can check out The Rewinder on Game Pass, Steam, and GOG.
