The August Before: Chapter One ★★★★☆

Where can you buy?

• Available on Steam

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Explanation to Negative Feedback

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No controller support

Unfortunately, this is a keyboard and mouse situation, where the mouse wheel will come in handy when you want to read certain things easier. So if you’ve got a laptop and don’t have a mouse to go along with it, you might struggle with reading some of the text you find within the game.

There’s not a lot of reading.

But you’ll come across at least one letter with smaller text.

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Explanation to Positive Feedback

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Photo album

Some photos you pick up will go on a cork board, and geez it sounds weird saying that because I don’t think I’ve dealt with one of them since my school days. They are still called that, right? Are they called something different and I just aged myself?

Whatever.

Other photos will go into a photo album and little drawings and text might come up beside the picture in question. It’s definitely not the kind of album that you’ll get in a game like Life is Strange. It’s very simplistic. The kind of photo album where the images speak more than text ever could.

And I like the fact that we have the opportunity to read into photographs that were taken and stored in a familiar go-to place.

Room shows where items might go

Not everything you pick up will have an area highlighted for where you need to place it.

But it’s not like the game will just allow you to place an item in the wrong place. Kind of like magazines you pick up won’t be going on the bookshelf, so you can’t just put them there. And if something should go into the suitcase, there will be an icon for it in the upper left, signifying either the suitcase or the extras box.

Which I think only has two items in it, oddly enough.

I think after you get a handle on where an item might go, that area doesn’t always light up afterwards. Such as with the sock situation and hangers and the like.

Four music tapes

The game doesn’t have a consistent soundtrack all by itself, I don’t think. If you want background music there are four different music tapes you can choose to listen to, the first one being part of the tutorial, while the others can be found throughout the room.

Don’t worry about them being too hard to find. You will definitely come across them as you clean the entire room.

To do list

The game gives you a checklist of what needs to be done in order to clean the room and move on. I believe you can do a little more than what the list consists of in order to get a 100% cleaning done, but it’s there for you if you need a kind of roadmap.

Maybe one of the things I don’t like is the fact that you have to hold spacebar down in order to keep the checklist visible, instead of clicking once, then clicking again to make it disappear.