For more on Yesterday Origins, check out our full Yesterday Origins review. Or, for more of the best Playstation 4 games for an 11 year old, why not try our Family Game Finder
What is Yesterday Origins?
Yesterday Origins is a point and click adventure game that tells the story of a pair of immortals, named John and Pauline. While they may be romantically involved, living forever hasn't been without its drawbacks for the pair - particularly for poor old John, as whenever he resurrects, his memories disappear, leaving him with no recollection of his past lives, and haunted by nightmarish snippets of centuries gone by. In Yesterday Origins, John and Pauline set out on a quest to find a mysterious artefact that should remove his amnesia once and for all, across a Da Vinci Code-esque tale of mystery, history and intrigue. By chatting to people you meet, exploring areas, and combining everyday items to solve complex puzzles, you'll take in everything from fifteenth century Spain to modern day New York on your quest, meeting all kinds of colourful characters along the way.
How do you play Yesterday Origins?
Slow-paced, and with a huge amount of puzzles to solve, Yesterday Origins is a game that taxes your brain rather than your trigger finger. Most of your time will be spent combing over each area with a fine toothpick, examining the scenery, and picking up any useful items you find along the way. These items will be the key to solving the game's many puzzles, with most requiring several stages of logical thinking to complete.
For example, fairly early on in the game, you'll need to fix a broken periscope in order to spy on a fellow monk. In order to find a replacement mirror, you'll need to examine a frozen font in a monastery hallway, use a plate of sea salt to melt the ice, and then pinch a chisel to level the disc up from the bottom, with both the salt and the chisel being found in different areas of the monastery. From there, you simply need to polish it up on Father Ezequiel's grindstone and voila, a stand in for the periscope's broken mirror!
When you're not picking up anything and everything that's not nailed down, you'll need to talk to various characters to fish for useful information. By exhausting every conversation option in the list, you'll gain insights, ideas and information that will prove essential in your quest, while using certain items with certain characters will trigger new avenues you can pursue. Sometimes, you'll acquire especially important info, which will be added to an inventory of sorts, ready to be used to solve certain puzzles, which ask you why you're combining two objects, or what outcome you hope to achieve, as the game almost asks you to "show your working" rather than just blindly experimenting.
How easy is Yesterday Origins to pick up and play?
Requiring a very specific type of logic to figure out the puzzles, not to mention plenty of experimentation, Yesterday Origins can be a bit challenging at times. If you can't work out what to do, you'll basically be stuck until you figure it out through persistence alone. Generally speaking, the puzzles are more straight forward than some similar games, with many of their solutions grounded in reality - using a whip to extend a too-short rope, shining a metal disc to make it reflective enough to pass for a mirror, or using a pair of chopsticks to pry a card out of a narrow air vent. If you've got a mind for puzzles, Yesterday Origins is a slow-paced, easy-going game perfect for that's bound to test your grey matter.
While most of the conversations and cutscenes are voiced, the descriptions, whether for items or people are not, and these descriptions often form an essential part of the puzzles themselves. Knowing that a monk has a torn robe, or that a venomous toad can cause hallucinations are important facts, and could impact how you approach the puzzles if you're a not so confident reader.
Sample Sentences:
- "If you rub the venomous toad against the tankard, whoever drinks from it will see ghastly visions. Why would you want to do that?"
- "Thanks to Google's infinite wisdom, you know that Baxter was on the cover of "Smoker's Monthly"."
- "The furrows in the pentagram channel the blood of the tortured and make it visible."
Aimed at an adult audience, Yesterday Origins features a fair amount of mature content - there's sex references, bloody violence and bad language aplenty.
In the opening hours of the game, a silhouetted woman shoots herself in the head in the shower, accompanied by a blood splatter on the door (although, as an immortal, she does come back to life straight after). Another scene sees the main character closing a spiked torture device onto his arm, in order to get a blood stained cloth to use in a puzzle; other scenes show a boy being thrown down a well, a woman's arm being hacked off by a sword and several corpses sitting in pools of blood.
Sex references are rather overt too, with characters saying things like "Every time he tries to mount me and he doesn't get a hard on, he knows something's up", "When we finish with them, you'll tell me if 500 years are enough for a man to find a clitoris" and "The nipples are so huge that Facebook's algorithm would censor them.", while the aforementioned blood splatter on the shower door is explained as her having started her period early. Pretty much every swear word under the sun crops up too, with everything from f*cking and sh*t to b*stard and b*tch being used - especially by the fifteenth century monks, who seem particularly foul mouthed.
Age Ratings
Format Reviewed: Playstation 4
