Souvenir

Sometimes life can catch you off-guard and dazzle you with a bouquet of unpleasant feelings, which is especially annoying when you seem to be cruising along just fine without a care in the world. Naturally, it’s quite obvious that these kind of feelings are a passing thing, but that doesn’t stop them from ruining your day and making you feel unable to enjoy anything pleasant.

Souvenir is a short jam game in which you are presented with the life of an old man who’s trying to live his life in peace and focus on the good things. It’s not a very polished game, that’s for sure, but as long as you are able to get past the annoying controls and the horrible camerawork, everything should fall into place and make sense toward the end of the story.

To begin with, the game is played from a third-person point of view, although that’s not technically true. Hence, you cannot control the camera yourself and rotate it around the character, it just shows you the environment from certain vantage points and follows the character around automatically. The lousy positioning makes it difficult to see where you’re going most of the time, which is a major annoyance.

Your goal is to explore the game world and take care of a few simple tasks, which suddenly become more important than they seemed at first. There’s a bit of philosophy involved in the story, but everyone should be able to understand it, since it’s not that deep, nor does it pose too difficult questions. On the other hand, it’s nice to see such things in an indie game.

Speaking of which, the game is designed using Unity, which means that you shouldn’t expect an awful lot from the visual quality. Granted, the whole thing was completed in a very short time window as well, given the fact that it was made for a jam. However, the graphic style used is quite pleasant and smooth, even if the textures are lacking and the polygons are in low supply.

All things considered, it’s quite a shame that Souvenir has camera problems and so little content, because the idea could have been expanded a lot more. However, it can be enjoyed even so, at least if you are patient enough to deal with its flaws.