‘Instants’ Solves Timeline Puzzles Through Scrapbooking

Instants has you connecting a timeline by creating a scrapbook page of cherished memories for your family and friends.

In this game, you start each level with an envelope full of meaningful pictures and items that bring back memories. You must then use these pictures and items to put together a story within your scrapbook. Often, you are asked to do this by family members who want a little gift or to preserve a bunch of memories.

The puzzle aspect of the game is through placing these photos or other bits of paper into the scrapbook. When you place something on the page, a kind of string-like line attaches them together. This line has arrows, showing what photo goes to the next based on where they are in the book. If they are in the correct order, it’s green. If they are sort of correct, it’s orange. If it’s really off, it’s red.

This is where the gameplay itself starts to get tricky. In the demo that I played at Indie Dev Day, it was actually really challenging to place the items in the correct order. As the pages are kind of small compared to some of the sizes of the items, it’s hard to really understand why the pictures were connecting the way they are. I knew the order I wanted, but there wasn’t much guidance on how to get them to line up. I hope in the final game there will be a way to place the images and then create the timeline yourself, dragging a line from one image to the next, to check them out.

Once you have placed everything down, you can customise your scrapbook. Instants has a bunch of different stickers, colored tape, paper for the background, and even text options that you can use to really personalize the scrapbook. When you are finished, you can submit the scrapbook and move onto the next chapter.

Instants does feel like it’s got a lot of love and care put into it, but struggles at the time between being a more puzzle-based game and a more cozy game. Even so, I do love the concept and cannot wait to see how the game develops.

Instants is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can add it to your Steam Wishlist.

About The Author

Jupiter Hadley

Jupiter is a prolific indie game journalist, writing for Metro UK, Big Boss Battle, AlphaBetaGamer, and many more, all with a focus on smaller indie gems. She covers thousands of game jams and indie games on her YouTube channel, letting every game have a moment in the spotlight. She runs indiegamejams.com, a calendar of all of the game jams going on in the world, judges many jams and events.