Shadow of Memories（PlayStation 2）
📖 How time travel and preventing death work
A conceptual explanation of gathering information across times and places and removing the causes of death.
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Time travel lets you move between periods such as the past and present to trace cause and effect. Understanding where people are and the order of events matters more than action-game reflexes. Connect the fragments of information found in each period to understand the circumstances behind the approaching death.
| Phase | Objective | Checklist |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction: understand the death | Identify precisely the conditions of the death you must prevent |
|
| Investigation: travel into the past | Locate the factors that cause the death along the timeline |
|
| Prevention and branching: choosing an ending | Choose actions that change fate and lead toward an ending |
|
1. You keep dying in the same scene, however often you retry.
Cause: You are confusing the immediate cause of death with its underlying cause.
Solution: Start with the cause of death in the present and work backward through the timeline to identify the past event that produced it.
2. You cannot decide which period to visit next.
Cause: Your clues are not connected to the unresolved cause of death.
Solution: Arrange possessions and conversation notes by cause of death, then prioritize the period containing the information you still need.
3. You reach an ending other than the one you intended.
Cause: You have not recorded the choices and actions that determine the outcome.
Solution: Keep a separate save just before a suspected branch, change your choice, and compare the results.
Time travel lets you move between periods such as the past and present to trace cause and effect. Understanding where people are and the order of events matters more than action-game reflexes. Connect the fragments of information found in each period to understand the circumstances behind the approaching death.
- ▸ Treat time travel as a way to investigate cause and effect.
- ▸ Gather circumstantial evidence from conversations and surroundings.
- ▸ Pay attention to the order of events in each period.
Rather than conventional victory or defeat, your objective is to keep preventing the protagonist's death. Removing the immediate cause can still leave an underlying factor that creates danger in another form. Think about the different layers of causation and where intervention would change fate.
- ▸ The objective is preventing death, not defeating enemies.
- ▸ Distinguish immediate causes from underlying ones.
- ▸ Always check whether the situation changed after your intervention.
Actions and choices change the ending, so using separate saves makes experimentation more convenient. Keeping separate slots before important choices or a trip into the past helps you compare outcomes and try other routes. Make use of the game's emphasis on trying again to progress efficiently.
- ▸ Save in a separate slot immediately before an important choice.
- ▸ Keep the state before traveling into the past.
- ▸ Use several saves with retries in mind.
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