Another Code: Recollection

Divided into two distinct parts that remake the previous two games in the series and weave them into a cohesive whole, Another Code: Recollection explores our often-troubled relationship with our parents and how our memories make up who we are.

13-year-old Ashley thought her parents died when she was three. But one day, shortly before her birthday, she receives an invitation to the ominously named Blood Edward Island, where her father apparently is waiting for her with open arms.  He has attached a strange device – which looks conspicuously like a Nintendo Switch – to the letter and asked her to come to him without additional explanation. It’s all too suspicious, of course, but her aunt, Jessica, confirms the story – her brother is a good man, they could trust him – and offers to accompany Ashley to the island. Soon after arriving there, however, Jessica goes missing, and Ashley does what any protagonist would do in her situation and starts to investigate everything by herself.

Blood Edward Island has a dark past marked by a succession of family tragedies – hence its name – and it’s that kind of place where, right next to a locked gate, we can find a little wooden stool with a hidden compartment holding the necessary key to open it. It’s no surprise, then, when Ashley soon arrives at a mansion that’s basically a huge puzzle box, as its past inhabitants liked to hide keys inside pianos that will only open if we play the correct sequence of notes, or inside a dollhouse, whose secret compartment will reveal itself only if we place the dolls in the right position: the kind of weird, nonsensical place that could only exist in a videogame, but works wonders to build a sense of mystery and discovery.

Blood Edward Island may sound like the setting of a horror story and, granted, its puzzle-box design would feel at home in any Resident Evil, but Another Code veers far from that tone. Take the gorgeous painterly art style, for example, full of bright and saturated colors, which makes us feel as if Ashley were visiting not a place called Blood Edward Island, but Island Delfino alongside Mario. Some spirits are haunting the place, yes, but the only one she meets is like Casper the Friendly Ghost: cute and harmless. Ashley calls him D after an inscription on a makeshift tomb and tries to help the boy recover his memories, for D has been wandering about for 57 years with no recollection of who he is and how he met his untimely end.

The tone here is of adventure, as we are unraveling a mystery, but there’s a permanent tinge of melancholy, too: when, early on, Ashley comes across some sketches her father made of her, she’s not exactly happy at the display of affection. She could barely recognize herself in the drawings, so they just highlight how her father hasn’t been a part of her life at all: they don’t know what each other looks like. D’s presence, too, although friendly, keeps reminding Ashley of death and loss, with the ghost of the little boy often remembering friends and family that are long, long gone.

Most cutscenes play out like comics with the screen divided into frames around the characters, which move around, getting bigger and smaller to indicate who’s speaking. And there’s this great moment early on when Ashley refuses to help D and her frame completely pushes him off the screen, taking it over all for itself: the frame movement displays how there’s no space for D in Ashley’s mind at that time. She’s being selfish, so there’s room only for her frame of mind.

Ashley may be onto something here, however, as the main narrative problem of the first part is that D’s memories are too frequent and predictable: almost every time we enter a room or check an important object, he’ll remember something and send us back to a flashback. There’s even this unintentionally funny moment when Ashley is lost in a crumbling library – the wooden floor is rotten and parts of it are collapsing – and instead of helping her find her way, as he can see well in the dark – the perks of being dead –, D simply stands there, completely still, with his mind lost in one more memory, leaving us to solve a little puzzle about lighting candles to proceed.

The puzzles themselves, although frequent, are fairly simple – the first is about placing a couple of wooden boards in the right position to form a bridge and the rest hardly get more complicated than that – with the most difficult ones being either related to actions we never realized we could even perform or to some needlessly ambiguous signposting: the one where we must turn the dial of a safe is a particularly egregious case, since even after discovering the right combination, we must still figure out what exactly it means, for “R20” could either mean “turn right 20 spaces” or “turn right until space 20.” There’s also another quite contrived puzzle where Ashley finds a piece of sheet music with a missing bar. We spot the bar somewhere else in the mansion, but instead of just copying it into a sheet of paper like any civilized person, Ashley decides to overcomplicate things with the Switch-like device her dad gave her.

The story in the first part comes down to Ashley’s and D’s relationship with their parents, as their quests are, in the end, all about the younger generation suffering for the mistakes of the previous one; it’s the “sin of the fathers” coming back to haunt the kids: it’s usually a shock when we find out what our parents are actually capable of and how it’s up to us to deal with that, whether we like it or not. In other words, it’s a story about disappointment and how uncovering the truth, even when it leads to that, is much better than living a comfortable lie: “Even though facing the truth can be hard, in the end, it’s always for the best,” characters will repeatedly say.

Then we have the second part of Another Code: Recollection, where Ashley – now 16 and wearing a rock-and-roll t-shirt – visits a lake her mother took her to when she was three. There she meets Matthew Crusoe, a boy who lost his memories regarding a certain incident. Ashley is quick to recognize the parallel between him and D and, touched by her time with the friendly ghost, decides to help Matthew look into the matter.

The tone in this second part is quite different: gone is the gloomy aura of the isolated Blood Edward Island, as Lake Juliet is sunny, cozy, and brimming with life. Ashley gets to make many friends – or enemies – with people almost her age, like the carefree clerk of a convenience shop or the rude Elizabeth, who appears to see Ashley as a rival for no good reason.

Puzzles become rarer in turn, turning into mostly minigames now, requiring more physical skill (as they use motion controls) than logical deduction – maybe a symptom of the original game being a Wii title – which is actually a good thing, as the puzzle design of the first part was a bit lacking.

The spotlight is more on the story now, which is also more character-based than plot-driven: yes, Ashley is always one step-forward in finding the truth about her mother and Matthew’s father, but the minute-by-minute storytelling is appropriately focused on character bits, on how an old woman – she would kill me if she knew I called her old, lucky me she’s fictional – lost contact with her daughter after opposing her relationship and now lives alone and full of regret, or how Elizabeth’s main issues arise from howpoorly she copes with her mother’s death, straining her relationship with her dad and shattering her own self-esteem.

Meanwhile, the antagonist’s strange nature plays with the idea that our memories are linked to our personality in an unexpected manner, which is a great way to tie up one of the game’s main motifs. But there’s one scene involving him that doesn’t quite work: basically, the guy’s whole design screams “red flag” to the point where the plot twist would be if he wasn’t the antagonist. Ashley, however, is none the wiser, believing this totally conspicuous guy to be a friend. And this one time he invites her to “his house”, which has several “For rent” signs in the yard and basically no furniture, and she’s like “Nah, this guy is just quirky, there’s nothing suspicious here.” Come on, Ashley, you’re smarter than that.

Besides that, this second part could have benefited from being longer and developing more of its side characters – some, like the owner of a restaurant, remain paper-thin, while others, like Ranger Dan, are under-utilized.

In the end, Another Code: Recollection is a game of two flawed, but still fascinating parts. The first could have boasted better puzzles and a less repetitive structure, while the latter could have been longer and more developed, but together they are more than the sum of their parts: this is one beautiful point-and-click game.

July 24, 2026.