Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today is a point and click adventure game developed by Fictorama Studios. The game itself promises to be dark and “mature”. It is currently crowdsourcing through Kickstarter with the alpha demo available for everybody and an extended demo for the backers. The playable character, Michael, wakes up with no memory in a dystopian world where some unlucky members of the population are quarantined into a filthy camp far away from the city. A mysterious opening in the sky has caused a chain of events that has led to the “New World”. Those who are infected with disease are called the dissolved, and Michael is one of many called blankheads, or those who have forgotten almost everything.

Michael wakes up in a trailer and he quickly learns about the family who brought him in. It turns out that he’s been asleep for weeks, and a disembodied female voice woke him up. The family’s son Colin is sick; he is one of the dissolved. If the neighbors find out about Colin, the government will take him away to a hospital where he will never be seen again. Colin’s father begs Michael to go out into the city to search for the vaccine that will cure his son. He emotionally blackmails him into the task, baiting him with the metaphoric carrot of regaining his memory for completing the task.

The 2D art is nice; all the characters have the Brock eye going on, maybe to symbolize the blindness of their actions, and to see others as human beings. Either that or it was a stylistic choice that I’m looking too much into. The coolest effect in the game is when everything suddenly looks distorted, like a TV screen with a bad signal. Fictorama has hinted that this is occurring because time itself is dissolving, and you must make haste. And the only people in this game that are able to see weird things are the dissolved.

The game’s point and click puzzles are straightforward; simple but not so easy that it doesn’t feel rewarding to figure out. The story and the animated cutscenes are what makes it really fun to play. The animated cutscenes look like those interactive graphic novels. The mystery of everything going on in this dystopian world is interesting, but may be too close to the edge of pretentious. But I would stick around to play this game - for the story.

The demo lasted for about an hour. It left at a cliffhanger (of course), just to keep me on my toes. It left more questions than answers, but that’s the whole point. It barely scratched the surface on what the full game experience will be. Dead Synchronicity is doing a good job on being a narrative so far, even though it’s not necessarily original.