Elsinore
Genres: Adventure, Narrative, Puzzle and Simulation
Released: July 2019. Added to this library 6 weeks ago.
Overview
Elsinore is a mystery-adventure set in Shakespeare's Hamlet. You play Elsinore who repeats the same four days as she tries to find a way to avoid the tragedy that lies before her.
You move around by clicking with the mouse and talk with different characters by choosing dialogue options. These simple interactions play into a complex living world where the story plays out around you in real-time. The challenge is to make interventions to change the course of its outcome. Lie, forgive, gossip, befriend, or destroy — the actions you can take at any stage are numerous, and the game immediately responds.
This is made all the more real because each character manages their own lives, schedules, needs, desires, and plans over the course of each time loop. Even the smallest interaction has an impact on the world around you as it unfolds.
What starts as a bewildering array of options slowly coalesces into plans over the course of each loop. Each time through you have more information gleam from previous plays and more options for intervention.
The game is engaging and intriguing but also requires considerable patience and planning. Meticulously crossing points off in your journal, learning more information, and trying to see how events could overlap takes time. You can spend an entire timeline loop pursuing a single character to learn how to subvert their actions. Some will find this exhausting, but for those who love a riddle to solve, Elsinore is a treat.
Tip
This game is good if you want to take on a mountainous challenge, manipulate time to win, control how the story ends or cope with losing.
Commitment
Costs
Ratings
Accessibility
System settings: Windows has extensive accessibility features. Some, like colour correction, work with games. Lots of accessibility software can be used with PC games, from voice recognition to input device emulators... read more.
Similar Games
The following games address a similar topic or offer a similar way to play. They are good options to play after Elsinore, and also offer a range of alternatives for different age ratings.
Maquette
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5
Genres: Puzzle and Simulation
Players: This is a single player game.
Costs: Purchase cost.
Maquette is a puzzle game played in a series of nested identical worlds. What you do in the larger world effects things in the smaller one, and so on. Every building, plant, and object are simultaneously tiny and staggeringly huge.
Returnal
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Costs: Purchase cost.
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I Am Dead
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Genres: Adventure, Narrative and Puzzle
Players: This is a single player game.
Costs: Purchase cost.
I Am Dead is a puzzle game from the creators of Wilmot's Warehouse. You play a recently-deceased museum curator trying to avert a disaster from his home town of Shelmerston.
Outer Wilds
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Genres: Open World and Simulation
Duration: Between 16 hours and 21 hours to complete.
Players: This is a single player game.
Costs: Purchase cost.
Outer Wilds is an exploration space mystery about a solar system trapped in an endless time-loop. After 20 minutes of game time, you must start again – but each time brings a new opportunity to learn how you ended up on the planet and solve the...
Tangle Tower
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC and iOS Apple Arcade
Duration: Between 6 hours and 7 hours to complete.
Players: This is a single player game.
Costs: Purchase cost.
Tangle Tower is a murder mystery game, from the same developer as Snipperclips, where you explore a grand old house and it’s intertwining families to solve a mysterious murder. You are given the events of the murder, each...
Ghost Trick
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Duration: Between 12 hours and 16 hours to complete.
Players: This is a single player game.
Costs: Free-to-start. In-game purchases.
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is a game where you play a ghost that can stop time to solve crimes and save lives. You can inhabit and control objects and possess corpses to alter what happens. His ultimate aim is to use his memories to find out how he...
Telling Lies
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Costs: Purchase cost.
Telling Lies is from the same developer as Her Story. It's named as an investigative thriller game with non-linear storytelling by the developer.
Return of the Obra Dinn
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
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Players: This is a single player game.
Costs: Purchase cost.
You play a shipping company agent assessing what happened on board a fictional East India Company ship where all the passengers have all mysteriously died. Exploring the ship, you can revisit the moment of death for each body in order to identify each...
Elsinore is in These Lists
In addition to the similar games listed above, which have been linked to this game specifically in the database, you may find games with a similar theme to Elsinore in the following lists:
Branching Stories With Multiple Endings
Setting aside games that evolve through simulation, or games where once you die it's game over, these branching narrative games tell a story that ends in a certain way because of the choices you made.
Attempt The Impossible
This might be grappling with the flying mechanics in Rocket League, getting endlessly lost trying to find the next guardian in Shadow of the Collosus or coming up with the right tactic to get enough money for the ship you need in Elite. Of course, some of these games can be made easier, but to play them at their best is to ramp up the difficulty to max (crushing on The Last Of Us for example) and let them give you all they've got.
Bend Time To Your Advantage
Persevere After Losing
These are interesting games for families, not only because their difficult nature leads to shorter sessions, but also because they foster perseverance and coping with losing. After dying you are sent back to some sort of central village where you can choose upgrades for your next attempt. The incentive to play again once you have been killed is usually that you start with some more equipment or skills.
In this way, by belligerence and a slowly learned understanding of how the game world works and how best to survive, you incrementally get a bit further each time you play. Here are some really good roguelike games for families:
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