Current Day Review (PC)

A sister on the verge of falling into an unforgiving slumber; a world on the brink of collapse; a barrage of knocks, all hoping and praying to claim sanctuary in the arms of a stranger. Current Day harbors choices—crucial decisions that can either dismantle your faith in humanity or alter the course of your collective lives. A knock could lead to monumental gain, much like it could also lead to the reckoning of a family that is on the verge of succumbing to the pressures of evolution. Here, every choice carries a lofty consequence, and it’s up to you to decide who to embrace and who to send back out into the fray.

If you’re familiar with Who’s at the Door?, then you ought to know how Current Day works. In short, it’s a choice-based game that taps into various survival-like gameplay elements. As a trying soul who happens to fall between a rock and a hard place—a world on the precipice of ruin and a sister who’s on the cusp of losing her battle against an illness—you find yourself in the position to make executive decision that can either tailor the narrative to your needs, or force the climax to elevate a devastating defeat. As the person who pulls the strings (or answers the door), you and you alone are presented with the opportunity to shape the timeline and stitch the fate of two worlds. No pressure there, then.

Current Day transpires over a period of time during which one stranger knocks at your door each day. The job, in short, is to answer it, analyze their credentials and motives, and decide whether or not to aid their cause or turn a blind eye to their needs. The caveat here is that, if you fail to recognize their intentions, then you will need to restart the loop from scratch. On the other hand, if you let them into your home, then you also need to exchange several of your resources—items that you need to keep your home on its axis. In other words, you launch your career with most, if not all cards stacked against you. And no, Current Day doesn’t hold your hand as you gradually subject yourself to an emotionally draining downward spiral. Thanks for that, HB Studio.

Not Today, Thank You

Current Day is, first and foremost, an interactive visual novel-like experience that invites you (and those who you choose to host) to endure the consequences of your actions and those around you. As the curator of keys and neighborly moments, you—the harborer of an inner sanctum—have the rather lofty goal of balancing your world and keeping certain rapscallion visitors at bay. And by resources, I mean general well-being, psychological, as well as physical health.

The problem with all of the above, sadly, is that you don’t know who’s who and what’s what. For example, a beggar could knock upon your door and ask for assistance, all whilst acting under the guise of another entity that wishes to bring you harm at a later point in time. There are also manipulators; untrustworthy strangers; and false prophets who think they know what’s best for you and your family to analyze and interpret. The question, however, still remains as clear as day: who will enter, and who will he be given the cold shoulder?

At the heart of all of this is a surprisingly difficult Papers, Please ordeal that leans into your insecurities and doubts. It doesn’t hold your hand, and it doesn’t tell you what the correct answer is. Instead, Current Day peppers its excursion with a selection of taxing encounters that can either make or break your run, as well as a series of radio frequency combinations and diary entries that, frankly, do little to help you come to terms with your rather unfortunate predicament. To add, it gives you the weighty goal of juggling hunger, decoding cloudy combinations, and keeping a lid on your ever-decreasing psychological state. A lot to take in here, yet we digress.

The bad news here is that, if you fail to keep tabs on your visitors and allow your diary to spell out your inevitable demise, then you must, annoyingly, start from the beginning via a conduit of deja vu moments. A headache, but a good one, oddly enough. But, more on that later.

Love Thy Neighbor

Unlike a lot of social deduction games that tap into choice-driven gameplay mechanics to weave their narrative, Current Day finds a great way to keep you on your toes and make it so that all of your decisions wax consequences, not just the occasional encounter. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a great deal to wrap your head around, and the journey itself isn’t exactly prone to any major hand-holding techniques that usher you closer towards the grand finale. That said, it does offer enough variety in its in-game dialogue and branching plot system, which makes it easier to slip back into the hot seat and unearth a new experience with each passing turn.

Current Day has some solid features beneath its bite-sized exterior, including a sturdy sketchbook Return of the Obra Dinn-like visual palette and a ton of perplexing crossroads that force you to think outside of the box, so to speak. Granted, it’s still a short experience that often struggles to capitalize on its greatest strengths, but then, at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome — unlike some pesky neighbors.

From a gameplay standpoint, Current Day runs as best as it can, despite being lauded by some visual errors and poor localization features. Still, for a small indie game that knows its limitations, I’d say that it exhumes a pretty solid experience, warts and all.

Verdict

It isn’t all that often that video games make choices feel weighty and impactful to the narrative, but here, in Current Day, the decisions that you make, oddly, do feel surprisingly taxing. Perhaps it’s the lack of context that it gives you, or maybe it’s the fact that it makes you dwell on past mistakes with a relentlessly unforgiving perma-death system. Whatever it is that propels Current Day into the spotlight, I have to say that HB Studio has pulled a great deal out of the bag here. Granted, it isn’t the greatest Who’s at the Door? doppelgänger on the market, though it is an underling that manages to get a ton of things right.

Of course, there’s a niche subject here that is likely to appeal to just as many people as it is to put them off entirely. I suppose it falls into a purgatory of sorts—an area that is, at least to some extent, fundamentally diluted and, therefore, likely to wedge a barrier between both sides of the coin. Having said that, if you enjoy unusual memory games that coherently pocket a lot of oddly intriguing elements, then you should take the time to knock upon this doorstep.