Time Hollow seems quite promising at first: you play as a high schooler named Ethan Kairos, who has just turned 17 and has obtained a pen referred to as the Hollow Pen. Ethan suffers greatly from a case of suburban domestic boredom from his seemingly plain family and ordinary school life… and then proceeds to take it all back once everything around him begins to rapidly unravel, with a series of temporal and unexplained incidents creating sudden, unwelcome changes that all revolve around making him and the people he care about miserable. As a result, you have to use the Hollow Pen to open portals to interact with events of the past and try and rewrite the negative externalities that keep popping up as consequences with meddling with the flow of time.

Sadly, the core gameplay loop doesn’t quite live up to the premise. Most of this investigative and puzzle work inevitably boils down to figuring out exactly what went wrong, and then talking to individuals across town and scanning a medley of locations to “resolve” flashbacks and gain an idea of what happened where and when. It falls into the same classic adventure game trap of “click everywhere to hopefully strike upon the right findings” because many times, the details that you need to stumble upon don’t actually align with intuition of where to visit/whom to speak with and the game generally doesn’t do the greatest job at highlighting what locations/areas are relevant and what areas are just flavor text/timewasters. Opening up portals is probably the coolest aspect here, but those segments are over in a flash; you open up a portal and talk to someone/drop off an item/meddle with an object, close the portal, and it’s onto the next flashback. That said, the game also has long stretches of cutscenes where it basically forces you into several strings of guided questions and scripted interactions, so Time Hollow never quite hits that perfect balance of satisfying the player with carefully crafted scenarios where the answer can be reasonably intuited but is never outright given away.

As a result, between the peddled cutscenes and excess meandering about, Time Hollow is often exhausting to play… which is not a good sign when the game only took seven hours to complete. The experience is further padded by the need to refill the Hollow Pen meter, which you’ll have to account for more if you screw up portal sections by opening the portal in the wrong location (easy to do because you won’t have a side by side reference on hand and some places are oddly specific regarding where you must click to proceed), but is also necessary in general because not refilling the meter will result in the meter’s capacity significantly dropping when moving onto the next chapter. This issue gets worse though, because in order to refill the meter, you have to find your cat wandering around town (in random locations that are unmarked upon the map, with tons of clicking around not just the map but also within locations to move between rooms/scenes) to refill one bar at a time. I do honestly think that at least an hour could be shaved off the length if the game allowed instant fast travel to not just locations on the map, but inner sectors within the locations themselves.

It’s difficult to recommend Time Hollow unfortunately; the detective/adventure game elements don’t feel very compelling or engaging, a lot of the side characters could have used more development before disaster suddenly strikes, the main antagonist feels too inexplicably vindictive and essentially becomes a comic book villain by the end of the game, and a lot of plot threads are either left on unsatisfying notes or have strange twists and reasoning behind them that feel like they were included just for the shock factor (a non-spoiler analogous example for your pleasure: man gets sent note in the past to join the Audubon Society -> man no longer commits arson and avoids arrest???!!?!?). There are two alternate New Game + endings, and the first is essentially a truncated version of the game and might be worth your curiosity, but the 2nd one is not quite as succinct; practically every action prior to the last 10 minutes or so is the exact same as the standard playthrough, and it only changes some minor details at the end, so you might be better off just looking up that extra ending on Youtube instead. The vibrant art style and background tunes are soothing at least, so it does get that coziness factor down, even if that coziness begins to overstay its welcome two hours in. Ultimately, it's enough of an interesting diversion if you’re looking for pleasant VNs to pass the time on the DS, but I’d suggest playing through the Cing library first.