Instants, a story-rich puzzle game that tells its narrative through a series of family photo albums, has launched alongside the Wholesome Direct. Throughout the game you’ll watch the family grow and experience significant life events like learning how to ride a bike, family vacations, and moving house. You know, all that sentimental stuff that brings a tear to your eye when you look back on it later down the line.
As you stick down pictures and decorate your first book, you’ll start getting letters from your family members showing an interest in your hobby for scrapbooking. You’ll be asked to create scrapbooks for special occasions, and given more photos to work with, which unfortunately don’t come with any sort of timeline for the moments they’ve captured. If you fancy it, you can switch off the need to place things chronologically and go into a more free game mode.
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However, it’s not just about finding the solution and placing the photos correctly. You’re also free to customize the experience by making your scrapbooks entirely your own. When you’ve solved the puzzle, you’ll be able to decorate your books with different stickers, washi tapes, and all sorts of other items to give them a more personal touch. As a junk journal enthusiast myself, being able to decorate the whole thing is definitely the element I’m most excited about.
As you complete pages, you’ll also earn little tokens which can be exchanged for baked goods and beverages for your character to “enjoy” while crafting. There’s no benefit to having these things unlocked, as far as I can tell from what I’ve seen in the trailer and experienced in the demo, but they do make for some aesthetic screenshots while you’re decorating your pages.
Completing an album or chapter of the story also unlocks more stickers and decorations you can use later down the line. Usually, these stickers and tapes will link to the theme for your next album, like snowflakes and pine trees for the winter holidays or airplanes when you start scrapbooking the first family vacation. Plus, to keep things relaxing, you’ll be able to get some hints from a little on-screen cat too, should you find yourself stuck on a puzzle.
Even though organising photos doesn’t sound like much of a challenge on paper, I imagine as you get further into the story of the family and start to cover generations, the difficulty will ramp up. Much like A Little to the Left, Instants feels like one of those games you can pick up, solve a few pages, and then leave for a while too, making it perfect for a cozy gamers library.
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