Ramas’ Call: Twisted Timing review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Some point-and-click fun beckons, though curious decisions might leave you feeling not quite yourself

I’ve always loved time-travel stories, but it’s hard to get them right because once you start applying logic to them, they often fall apart. Then again, what real logic can there be in imagining something that isn’t even possible? Adventure games lend themselves well to telling impossible or at least fantastical stories, and Ramas’ Call: Twisted Timing is one of those tall tales. Ideally this cartoony Spanish adventure will get English voice-overs in the future, and there is definitely room for other improvements as well, as some graphical glitches and conditional programming could use fine tuning. Still, there’s fun to be had in this whimsical, adventurous mix of sci-fi and fantasy, and thankfully three difficulty levels help to concentrate your puzzling focus on what’s truly important. It’s a shame, then, that the payoff for doing so is essentially a non-ending that merely hints at more to come.

Starting up the game is a bit strange. You never see a title screen, but instead pop straight into the options menu. You begin Ramas’ Call as Sarah, assistant to a typical loony professor who’s about to invent time travel. At the end of this introduction, you witness the professor’s other assistant, Mic, accidentally being sucked into a vortex. You’ll take control of him when he arrives in a strange, faraway medieval land. Any attempts to find out precisely where and when Mic now finds himself lead to zilch: its geographical location doesn’t seem to fit any known world map, yet the inhabitants speak the same language as Mic. The main quest is trying to get Mic back home, which will mean getting fully acquainted with this unfamiliar place and fraternizing with its people. Eventually you’ll assume control of Sarah once more, helping out Mic in true Time-Turner-wielding Hermione Granger style.

The introduction works as a tutorial, with a Spanish voice-over explaining the user interface. Ramas’ Call has English subtitles but they contain the occasional typo and missing capital letters or punctuation. Moving around uses a standard point-and-click control scheme, while interacting with the environment involves a verb coin system in the shape of the playable character’s head, where you choose to either “look,” “use” or “talk to,” though often it’s also used for “talk about” and even “taste” – options I wasn’t aware of at first, which led to me getting seriously stuck a couple of times.

The mechanics for utilizing the mouse take some adapting, too, with a verb coin system that hails from a previous era. Instead of simply pointing and clicking on hotspots, you have to click and hold over a hotspot, then drag the cursor over to the desired action, then release to perform said action. This feels a little clunky at first, but once you get the hang of it, this soon becomes second nature. The inventory opens up at the top of the screen with a right click of the mouse, or by clicking the designated icon in the bottom right of the screen. It works normally, with no dragging necessary, though sometimes (not always) an item will disappear back into the inventory before you’re able to use it on a second hotspot when you are trying things out.

And trying things out you will probably have to do – a lot! Many of the game’s puzzles weren’t that intuitive to me, and the interface didn’t make it any easier. Thankfully there are three difficulty settings you can switch between throughout, changing the way hotspots are highlighted when you hover the cursor over one. Normal mode highlights all hotspots, while in hard mode there are no highlights at all, and you’ll have to figure out for yourself which items in the scenery can be interacted with. Easy mode only highlights the hotspots you actually need to solve the puzzles. In the second half of the game, I found myself switching to easy mode to help steer me in the right direction. The downside to this is you tend to move on too fast that way and might miss out on loads of unique responses to optional interactions involving the still-active but non-highlighted hotspots, so I kept going back to normal mode to search for all the non-essential hotspots again just to experience the funny writing.

The characters have a colorful, cartoonish 2D design that looks quite endearing and made me think of the Saturday morning shows I used to watch as a kid. Besides Mic, Sarah and the professor, this medieval realm has an armor-wearing guard, a haughty nobleman, a humble sheep herder, an experiment-loving alchemist – for whom you will have to gather all kinds of ingredients throughout the game – and several other townsfolk, all with their specific functions in the obstacles you must overcome. Several puzzles involve a mysterious cloaked stranger; a thief whose hideout you will need to locate.

The backgrounds are simplistically drawn but with plenty of detail. Every scene is filled with little extras just for fun, like a model DeLorean on a shelf in the professor’s lab, and a hunting trophy in a castle bedroom that keeps changing into a different animal’s head every time you enter the room. Ramas’ Call does suffer from some graphical glitches, unfortunately, especially when you move in and out of the menu to manually save your game. Objects and even characters tend to disappear, even though their outlines still highlight when you hover over their position. 

The characters’ Spanish voice actors speak fast, though I did catch the stray word here and there. It’s hard for a foreigner to get a good feel for intonation and general acting when it involves an unknown language, but to me they sounded like fun performances. Besides the voices, the game is embellished with open source sound effects and musical tracks, only one of the latter being memorable and heroic enough to fit the story. The rest of the constantly looping, location-specific, 80s-synthesizer-heavy music imitating the jingles of a PC’s internal speakers pretty much fades into the background.

Ramas' Call: Twisted Timing

Genre:	Fantasy, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Team-up
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Long (more than 10 hours)
Difficulty:	High

The puzzles are all inventory- and dialogue-based, except for one quite enjoyable mini-game where you have to put out a forest fire by dousing the flames with three buckets of water, which slowly refill over time. Wait too long, however, and the fire will spread again. You need to time your use of the buckets just right if you want to put out the flames quickly. (You can’t fail, as the mini-game will keep playing continuously until you succeed.) This task was a welcome break from the sometimes monotonous exhausting of hotspots, even though the writers put a lot of effort into unique responses for each.

Some inventory items you will only be able to pick up after having triggered the right clue by using the verb coin to look at it first, or by talking to other characters. But there’s also another unconventional technique behind it all. Mic has multiple personalities – or character types – harking back to his love for tabletop roleplaying games. You can switch between them by equipping a different accessory, which you can cycle through on the right side of the screen after stumbling upon them during your travels. There’s Mic the geek, throwing around twenty-sided dice and comparing everything to the movies and sci-fi shows he’s seen. Donning a fedora turns him into a hardened adventurer who will want to brute-force his way through an obstacle. Put on the monocle and Mic turns into a Sherlock Holmes type of investigator, always scanning for hidden details that might give him an edge. Put a feather in his cap, and he’ll be able to sweet talk his way past other characters.

Each of these personas has its own view of the game world and unique responses when interacting with the world. To solve any particular puzzle, you may have to switch between all of them to figure out the solution. This can add an intriguing extra layer, but it can also be boring, especially when you don’t really know what you are supposed to be doing or what you need to concentrate on. In such cases, you may wind up looking at or trying to use all hotspots in every room four times in a row, just hoping for that one piece of information that will guide you towards the answer. And if you’re stuck like that, it can get quite irritating that Mic always offers the same one-liners each time he switches personalities.

I found this an interesting technique that can really be fun, if you don’t mind spending lots of time on thorough exploration. But it does turn Ramas’ Call into a very slow-paced, leisurely experience, while simultaneously raising the difficulty level without clear direction. Since the game has some pretty hard puzzles to begin with, it forces you to take your time, because it’s easy to overlook something when you want to quickly move on. Another thing I didn’t always find very intuitive was when certain clues unlocked new dialogue options with NPCs. Usually I discovered it by pure chance, and it doesn’t help that all dialogue options are standard gray. It would have been much better if new topics were presented in a distinct color to make them more visibly apparent.

There are other irritations as well, as Ramas’ Call suffers from what I coin the Cruise for a Corpse syndrome. It seems to require you to perform specific tasks at predetermined moments, even when you have already done them much earlier. Mic – and later on Sarah – will sometimes refuse to do something if you haven’t found the right clues and information right before you need to solve that puzzle – even if you already acquired that information far earlier by being a thorough adventure gamer! For example, Mic may need to read a book in the alchemist’s library a second time for no reason, or Sarah will have to check the clues she’s already jotted down in her notebook again, or talk to another character about a topic you discussed earlier, as if needing to refresh their memories. Whenever I found myself stuck, it was usually because of something like this.

As you progress through the story, more and more locales will become available. You start off at some crossroads in the fields, but will later wind up in jail and need to figure out your escape. You’ll also be able to explore a bit of the castle and nearby town. At the halfway point you’ll get access to a map with the ability to fast-travel between these places, which is then added below Mic’s different character types. These extra areas, coupled with the four personalities and all their various possibilities for interaction, slow the rhythm of the game down even more. And then you reach the maze…

Ramas’ Call features a forest with lots of different locations, but there’s no structure to them. No matter what path you follow, it’s all randomized as to which part of the forest you will wind up in next. You simply can’t navigate this place logically, at least in any pattern I could discern. It becomes quite annoying when you finally realize the solution to a certain puzzle and which part of the forest you have to go to next, only to constantly find yourself back at the entrance through no fault of your own, having to try several more times before you finally reach your desired destination.

It’s in this forest that the mix of sci-fi and fantasy really presents itself and you finally discover who exactly the titular Ramas is – a godlike entity who will grant your wish if you succeed in bringing him the right offerings. Karl the alchemist has moved here from his laboratory in the castle, and will give you cryptic clues as to what these offerings entail. What follows is a scavenger hunt; some items will just be lying around, while others involve combining items in order to obtain them – or even catch, in the case of some fireflies! You will also have to persuade other characters either to trade or to physically help you, like a more nimble stable boy who can better reach high places.  

The final element to address is the ending of the game itself. Or more accurately: the lack of a satisfactory conclusion to all the puzzling hardship you went through. The story of Ramas’ Call features both science and magic, but the cliffhanger ending is triggered by an inexplicable event. It’s told through a beautifully stylistic cutscene (which also appear at set points throughout the game to connect chapters) but I couldn’t believe my eyes when the word “Fin” suddenly displayed, followed by a big question mark. This seems to indicate that the developers have a direct sequel in mind, with no closure offered for this one. When it comes to a game I just spent over ten hours on, I’m expecting at least some kind of resolution. 

Final Verdict

For all my criticisms, Ramas’ Call: Twisted Timing isn't a bad game per se. It's not brilliant, obviously, and it lacks a decent payoff, but it’s presented in a charming art style and takes you through a collection of inventory puzzles and NPC questioning in a story filled to the brim with unique responses. That makes for a solid bit of adventuring, if disappointingly unintuitive at times, with the added clever premise of having multiple personas available. It’s very slow paced as a result, but I do believe there's an audience among those who love to take their time exploring and trying out everything instead of rushing through to the end – which is just as well, as all you’ll get is the setup for a sequel here instead. There are certainly much better games of its kind, but if you find yourself in that mellow mood for a traditional and mildly amusing point-and-click adventure, there are some fun stretches to be found, and you may just pick up some Spanish while you’re at it. 

Johnny played Ramas’ Call: Twisted Timing on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.