In today’s world, where most pictures are captured and stored digitally on smartphones and physical media in general is on an ever-continuing decline, the act of keeping physical photo albums is increasingly becoming a lost art. If you’ve never had the experience of putting together a scrapbook before (like me), then Instants might give you a worthwhile glimpse into what it feels like.
Developed by Spanish studio Endflame, Instants is a cozy, nostalgic, narrative puzzle game where you play as Maya, a woman who is tasked with putting together a collection of photo albums by various members of your family. The game is divided into chapters where you are given clusters of photographs accompanied by a letter outlining your task (e.g. “put together an album as a birthday gift for Grandma”), and the objective of each chapter is to arrange the photos in chronological order.
To sum up the narrative’s central theme (at risk of sounding like a Toretto), it’s all about family. With each chapter, the story brings you along a heartwarming journey as you unfold key moments throughout Maya’s family history. Through every photo you get to see snapshots of Maya and her loved ones growing up, falling in love, celebrating birthdays, going on camping trips, gathering for reunions, and so on.
Instants is quite minimalistic in its gameplay design and UI. Controls are as simple and intuitive as drag-and-drop – in fact, most of the game can be played with just the mouse. The puzzles themselves aren’t too challenging, especially given that the game gives you visual aids to indicate the correctness of your timeline in the form of ‘traffic light’-colored arrows running between pictures. (You can choose to disable this feature if you want more of a challenge).
That being said however, in Instants, I would argue that the puzzles aren’t really the point: the story itself is rather short, spanning only 17 chapters. If you were playing simply to solve each puzzle and move on, you’d probably clear the entire game in little over an hour – however, playing the game this way would mean missing out on another significant dimension of the gameplay experience. The main source of mechanical depth in the game, and where I feel it shines the most, lies in what comes after you’ve worked out the solutions.
Once you’re done sorting the photos in a given chapter, the game opens up by giving you a comprehensive array of features to embellish your scrapbook with. Throughout the game, you gain access to a wide variety of accessories like stickers, washi tape, typefaces to annotate with, and even background patterns that you can use to breathe additional life into your album pages. The game also gives you tools for more in-depth customization in the ability to freely move, resize, rotate, duplicate, and even change the color of said cosmetic elements.
In addition to the main gameplay, there’s also interactable decor that you can personalize your workspace with: at first, you’re given a small plate of cookies to snack on, and a cup of tea that you can sip away bit by bit, both of which sit just on the outer edge of the frame. Solving puzzles rewards you with tokens, which you can use to unlock different variants of snacks and drinks, such as a sushi platter or a hot chocolate with marshmallows (to name a couple). There’s also a cassette player that you can use to control the game’s chill lo-fi soundtrack.
The evident care put into the various creative aspects of the game feels like enough to invite you to engage with it thoughtfully in return – however the game doesn’t outright ask it of you, letting you take things at your own pace. All of the creative mechanics described are, indeed, fully optional to engage with, so the enjoyment you get out of the game will be directly proportional to the effort you put into decorating.
If spending a couple of hours decorating a photo album page with stickers and washi tape is the sort of thing that appeals to you, then Instants is a wonderful game to pick up. However, I can also easily see more puzzle-oriented players feeling like the small number of chapters and relatively short runtime of the game leaves a bit to be desired.
Verdict: I Miss My Family
In Instants, Endflame delivers a heartwarming narrative about a loving family, told through delightfully simple cozy gameplay. Although the story/puzzles run a bit short, the game makes up for it through its fleshed out decoration mechanics. The game’s various elements such as the art direction, breadth of creative options, and game-feel tidbits add up to deliver a thoughtfully personal exercise in reminiscence and memory preservation.
This article was contributed by Fjordyboy, an avid indie game enthusiast, content creator, and member of The Cham Drinkers. You can find him on various platforms (linked here).
