Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today: PS4 Review

     Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today is a great post-apocalyptic point-and-click adventure blending post-apocalyptic science fiction peppered with religious elements to tell a harrowing story.  This is the tale of Michael, an amnesiac man waking in a dystopian future after a cataclysm called the "Great Wave" has destroyed much of the populace of the world and left a scar across the sky.  What remains is a ruined society plagued by a sickness of a dying world.  With many of its inhabitants coming down with a disease that causes people to dissolve and those with power (such as guns or fuel) use it for dark intent.

THE BAD

     The puzzles of the game can be a bit frustrating at times, but for the most part they are decently balanced and the game has a kind of dual hint system.  One is by holding L2/R2 and anything interactable becomes marked, and the second is Michael will make a remark that assists players as to where they should go.  When I said some puzzles can be frustrating it's because they don't follow a logical pattern or the challenge is so absurd you'll rely on pure trial-and-error of using items on anything you can.  In one notable case you need to fix a machine with a piece of a tooth.  Of all the possible things you could fix it with, why a tooth?  Or another requires you shred a cloth for a bandage instead of just using the cloth.  No reason other than adding an additional step in the process.
     Though, this is a problem with many point-and-click games.  Often confusion takes first place in attempting to figure out what you are supposed to be doing.  Finding a good balance between difficulty and creativity is extremely difficult to manage and is really an issue of the genre and not the game.

THE GOOD

     What the game gets right, though, is the atmosphere.  They got it very right.  The sound design and score are extremely effective in evoking the dark tones of a gritty decaying world.  They compliment the distinctly comic-bookish art style perfectly and together act as a large redeeming factor for playing this game.  The visual art designs work hand in hand with the sound and music to create a suspenseful and grim ambiance.

     This world they've built is intriguing in that it gives you no happy endings.  Many characters in the game are given disturbing or unsettling story arcs.  There's a family torn apart by a sick child, a young woman forced into service, and an entire park overflowing with corpses.  Your choices and decisions don't alter the endings at all, each leads to the same bleak despair laden conclusions regardless of what you say or do.  The main thread itself comes to a very sudden end, which feels very rushed and out of nowhere- like there might be something extra, but there wasn't.  It is foreshadowed, but the way it's done could've been worked towards and not just dumped on us all at once.  The game could've used a bit more work on the end to make the journey really pack an emotional punch at the end.

THE VERDICT 

     Overall, Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today on Playstation 4 is a game that is both really good in many ways and has some serious flaws.  It has a very fitting and unique art style with fantastic world building, but that is offset by some of the confoundingly strange puzzle designs.  That being said, if you are a fan of point-and-click games, or of psychological post-apocalyptic horror stories, this is worth playing because despite its problems there's still a lot to appreciate.

*Review copy provided, thank you!