Eike Kusch is having a bad day. While strolling through his picturesque German village, he’s suddenly murdered by an unknown assailant. What a downer. However, Eike is granted a second chance. A mysterious being dubbed “Homunculus” grants our metrosexual hero a second chance. Eike receives a pocket-sized time machine from the strange creature and is sent back out into the world to find out who it is that wants him dead. While investigating, he is killed over and over again. Someone really has it out for poor Eike, but he’s always given another chance to cheat death. Although the set-up is undeniably clever, the end results are frustratingly flawed in Shadow of Destiny, a port of a Playstation 2 game.

To say that Shadow of Destiny seems like movie would be entirely accurate. The game itself takes around five hours to beat, but the cutscenes take up around three hours of it. With such a hefty amount of cutscenes, the storyline has to be something special to justify such a huge emphasis placed on them. Fortunately, this is the one area that Shadow of Destiny excels in.

Don’t expect this to be a humorous time-travel romp like the Back to the Future trilogy was. This is more along the lines of Bruce Willis’ Twelve Monkeys in terms of complexity and drama. The repercussions of time travel are handled intelligently, and many of the subplots are very involving. The main characters are intriguing, and it’s hard not to care when their fates change because of your actions. Of course, there are also some shocking twists that can be interpreted in many ways. Just wait till you find out who the killer is. The multiple endings also add layers of depth with their engrossing outcomes. What drags it down is some awful voice acting the occasional cringe-inducing line, but despite these heavy faults, the plot stands out as a thought-provoking achievement.

In between the many lengthy cutscenes is a bit of gameplay, but what’s here manages to disappoint. Being an adventure game, there is no combat or action to speak of. Eike must avoid death throughout the eight chapters by solving puzzles in based on the way he’s killed. Eike has to travel from four distinct time periods in his village dating back to as far as 400 years ago, but sometimes he only has to travel an a day or two in the past.

The ways you must avoid death are fairly clever. In one instance, Eike is killed by someone hiding behind a tree. Traveling back hundreds of years, he must find the person who first planted the tree and convince him to do otherwise. Wait a minute- did I just spoil some of the game? Not really, since you have your hand held throughout the whole game and there’s very little you have to figure out for yourself. The main problem is that everything is just far too simple. You’re always told what time period to talk to, and rarely do you have to use anything from your inventory that requires some thought. The puzzles are just insulting to anyone who has played an adventure game before. Many of the chapters just have you walking from one place to the other while watching cutscenes, and after that the chapter is finished.

Though this is an adventure game, it is possible to see the dreaded “Game Over” screen. Time passes in the present while you’re in the past, so if you spend too much time dawdling around you’ll eventually die for good. Though the game does tell you at what time you’ll die, I managed to fail a chapter once this way. I started it up from the last save point and to my horror I realized I had to watch the same half hour of cutscenes I just watched. Normally you can skip the cutscenes that you’ve already seen, but I had to sit through all of them again. This was a crippling design flaw that should not even exist.

Though the gameplay is far from enticing, at least the graphics fare better. However, the results are mixed. The character models are nicely detailed and are able to convey emotion through effective animations. A nice touch is that the lips are almost perfectly synched up with the dialogue, which is quite a feat since this is a Japanese game. It’s too bad the German village Eikes inhabits looks poor in comparison. The trees and shrubbery appear to be two dimensional, and there’s plenty of pop-up to be found. It detracts from unique look that each time period has.

The graphical issues pale in comparison to a problem Shadow of Destiny obtained in the transition from PS2 to PC. There is absolutely no way to customize the controls. This is a minor nuisance if using the keyboard, but it renders the gamepad useless. Since you can’t configure the controller to move the camera, controlling Eike becomes a huge pain. It’s also awkward how some of the buttons differ from controller to controller. In one controller I used the action command was one of the trigger buttons. This lack of optimization shows how little time was apparently put into the PC version.

As insulting as the gameplay is, the storyline should be highly commended. It’s not too often that a narrative in a game is so successfully thought out and executed. Since the storyline is essentially half the game, and the multiple endings work so well, I can’t say I totally disliked this game. Even so, the port issues are inexcusable, so consider yourself forewarned if you plan to try Shadow of Destiny.