Sometimes coming home is complicated. It might be that you’ve changed – the world outside your childhood walls tends to do that to you as the possibility of self-discovery continually opens up. Other times, it’s because home itself has changed; the relationships there have become strained or, more tragically, ended altogether.
Sometimes there’s a profound absence waiting for you, back home. And sometimes, home itself might soon become only a memory.
In Desta: The Memories Between, our titular protagonist finds all of these things waiting for them. In the wake of their father’s death, Desta arrives home to help their mother empty their childhood home before its eventual sale.
Any household dealing with grief is bound to be fraught with emotional tripwires, places where a gulf has opened between the remaining members of the family which the deceased might have filled. But for Desta, there are other strained relationships left in the wake of their grief. Friends, role models, found family — all left jilted by their desperate escape.
This is to say: Desta is a tactical, turn-based combat sim. The natural genre for a game hellbent on exploring the troubles and trauma of deep, emotional healing.
In reality, the narrative framing of the game is as elegant and poignant as its lush, magenta-soaked aesthetic or its dream-synth soundtrack by Mansur Brown. Wrapped up in dreams informed by their counselor father’s ‘pass the ball’ emotional exercises, Desta must untangle tricky conversations with their friends by way of dodgeball.
Unlike other recent turn-based strategies like Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Mario + Rabbids, or king-of-the-genre Fire Emblem, Desta is not overly concerned with deep role-playing skill trees or weapon-weakness cycles. Rather, it’s an emotional difficulty the game is interested in. The major concern is figuring out how to repair neglected relationships and recruiting your friends to battle your way across more difficult burned relationship bridges.
This makes your connection to your recruited friends surprisingly meaningful – you have, after all, literally fought for these relationships. My partner, playing with me, expressed an earnest regret for neglecting some characters in favor of others; with her party restricted to three, she worried that she wasn’t spending enough time with party-boy James, or that sweet art teacher Mrs. K wasn’t leveling up as quickly as BFF Fran. For my part, I worried that perhaps failure was the best way to fully uncover the deeper relationships, as repeated attempts at each character’s level presented new, more telling dialogue.
Further softening the genre choice is the smooth integration of rogue-lite features; each playthrough unlocks skills and upgrades, but any subsequent loss wakes Desta from their dream, resetting your potential loadout. In one run, Desta might find the ability to zip around the screen via a hookshot-like chain, while another might see them dealing splash damage to the ravers, influencers, and bodybuilders who make up the game’s group of enemies. It’s only by leveling these skills up that the player can retain them for future playthroughs, and this gives the game a satisfying feeling of progression not only in its impactful narrative but in its snappy gameplay.
There was a concern, as we neared the (happily) tear-jerking resolution of the game, that we weren’t getting enough gameplay to justify the size of the cast and skill pool. The story runs about five hours, during which some characters do get neglected, and the surface of that rogue-lite compulsion is barely scratched. By moving so quickly, it felt as if emotional beats might be rushed or skipped over altogether, and there was a nagging sense of having missed something.
Thankfully, the Dream Team Edition expands the game from its initial small set of content. A bevy of intricately balanced challenge levels even leads to the unlocking of three more characters, and a Nightmare mode allows the player to double down on the tactical difficulty and build all those beautiful relationships.
Coming home is complicated. What Desta: The Memories Between imparts to the player is that it is also satisfying. Frightening conversations might not be as difficult as imagined, and, even if they are, the resolution on the other side is a beautiful thing.
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