Flashback

I think this will be a tentative recommendation.

I'm not sure where to start, with this release or the video game, but let's talk about the game itself I suppose.

So, Flashback is somehow one of the best selling French video games of all time, it has been released to many different platforms, and yet it's a game with only a little over 400 reviews on Steam at this time. It's an action-adventure game I suppose as the store page says, that much is true. It's also something of a platformer, because you will be doing a lot of running, jumping, and climbing up ledges.

Your guy, Conrad, can walk, run, jump, climb, and with his GUN he can shoot everything to death with unlimited ammo and you just have to hold down the fire button to get him to attack. This ends up being gradually more and more important as you play through the game.

The basic structure is, you are presented with a level. Then you do stuff in it. For the first half, it's something of a diverse experience. The first level is mostly exploration with some shooting here and there. The second level has you running a bunch of errands around town. After that, during the second half of the game however, pretty much every level and almost every screen, you are up against one or more enemies and you just have to hold down the shoot button most of the time to dispatch them. Certain enemies demand a little more from you, including using what is basically a parry (the Force Shield), and sometimes a whole lot of dodge rolling.

There's several different difficulties for this game. Easy, Normal, Expert. There's also 'rewind' and 'non-rewind' mode, which is a feature introduced with this port I suppose. I played on Expert non-rewind since the first level was challenging but I figured well, if I'm having this much trouble, Expert surely can't be that much worse. And, it turned out to be way harder than I was expecting, so if you DO play this game, I don't recommend playing on Expert.

I think that the main problem is with how combat-heavy this game gets later, it's shockingly uninteresting for the most part. Enemies in the last level in particular are just a nightmare to deal with. You basically get a means however, to restore your life to full whenever you want, though it's not completely free, it usually means you have to walk back to where you were fighting, it just takes a while.

So in Flashback, you die when you are shot 5 times. You can restore your hit points by interacting with a recharge station which fills up your shield. You need shield to survive hits.

Enemies in this game don't ever do more than 1 damage to you at a time, and you get very long invulnerability frames afterwards, which is nice. However, on Expert in particular, enemies take MANY many hits to actually kill (8, 10, 12 shots or something ridiculous for every enemy, I don't know, I never kept track, I just know it's a lot) and the game spawns WAY more enemies. There are multiple screens in the first level, on Easy mode, where there are no enemies whatsoever, and it's just your chance to explore. On Expert, all of these screens have anywhere from 1-3 enemies on them.

Enemy reaction times also increase based on difficulty, to the point where if you play on Expert, many enemies if they are on the same level as you for even a few frames, will instantly aim and fire at you and there's not a lot you can do except hope you are REALLY good at using your Force Shield at the right time.

The challenge in Expert also really just comes down to not losing focus, and not getting greedy. You're just constantly incentivized by enemies chipping away your health, to just go back to the nearest recharge station, get your health back, and return to chip away at the enemies. This is mostly very very tedious, especially when sometimes it takes multiple trips back and forth between recharger and battlefield to clear out a single room!

The way you fight enemies is generally very repetitive and simple. For every enemy, you just have to manipulate their AI and get them to stand where you want them to stand, so you can can shoot them to death as easily as possible. Any time an enemy gets away from you, very bad things happen, so it's mandatory to figure out the weaknesses in their AI. For example cops can't retaliate against you if you wait for them to step just barely onto the edge of the screen, then you shoot them.

The graphics and the animation in this game are really spectacular and every level has a unique look to it. You get enough of each one, and yet none really wears out its welcome. What felt like the longest level, the last one, doesn't at all get boring since it's so visually interesting. The animation is really smooth and it makes me wish that more video games today looked as good as this.

The main thing it seems like they actually remastered was the sound, or they tried anyway. I played with the oldschool soundtrack, which I think was the correct choice, since trying to make all new, high quality sound for an old game like that... well, it really just doesn't match, in my opinion. I like most of the sound of this game, except the music, because though there was some decent music in this game it's so sparse. There were many occasions when I was thinking, that, having a nice chill background track would be really good for some areas.

In Flashback as it is, music seems to only really play once in a while when you enter specific parts of certain screens, or, if you draw your weapon then sometimes it plays like a 16 second piece of music. I think it would have improved the game even if it just had blanket pieces of wallpaper music for each level, ideally unobtrusive stuff that just helps to set the mood.

Anyway, so the game is okay. It's not the best thing I have ever played, but it looks great and I think if you were playing on Easy probably also with rewind on, you might have more fun playing this game.

As for this release...

Well, it's kind of buggy. I already mentioned their remastered soundtrack kinda sucks. The awful filters they tried to add in the graphics menu can fortunately be turned off, but they default to ON if you select modern AND in my experience, Bloom and Antialiasing ALWAYS were on, even when they were not ticked in the options menu they STILL continued to be on, so you have to enable them then disable them again!

There's other bugs too, more troubling ones. Myself and several other players experienced, after a certain point, our save file moving from slot 1 to slot 3... it's pretty much inexplicable. Fortunately, I haven't heard of anyone's save data being corrupted but it's not something you really want to see. I'm also not sure if this means that your game always saves to slot 3 if you get to or past a certain point in the game? I just don't know.

The main menu, all of the menus in fact are INCREDIBLY slow. It feels like navigating the menus is as unresponsive as the 90s platformer man you control in this game. That's not great to say the least. Additionally there's really no special features to this game or anything, there's a weird 'street art' point system, but the points are completely bugged and will respawn whenever they feel like it, seemingly, so it's very easy to get more points than you need.

And what is this 'street art' point system? Well, it lets you unlock street art. Like, photos of 'street art'. Which appears to be just... someone made mosaics of Conrad's sprites and put them on random buildings and things and then took photos of that, and now it's just in the game.

I actually might have been interested in a developer commentary track, or even a short film in that vein, or something, but there's really nothing like that, it's just the game pretty much.

I think I got this game for $1 on sale, so, it's probably worth picking up. I think this is an OK game that is probably more enjoyable just for the aesthetics of the game, than the gameplay itself, which is only alright.

Nostalgic!

I never finished this as a kid, and finally did in 2025.

The game has super clunky controls, but I managed to enjoy it, and get through it nonetheless.

um dos jogos que não comprei para a mega drive mas queria mesmo.

e ainda bem!! com o que custavam ia ficar bem lixado.

os controlos são do piorio. frustrado com os puzzles, tudo bem.

lidar com um laggado mental, nem por isso.

This a classic game from 1993, it was Prince of Persia but in the future. I used to play the game in DOS, and never managed to get past level 2.

I finally beat it after decades, let's talk about the original game first. Game has a lot of combat, but since it plays in a grid, it's more like a puzzle where each screen you need to understand and figure out how to proceed without taking too much damage. There's enough different enemies and each have their strategy. Each level is long, very long and different. Real puzzles are easy enough to not block you a lot. The main issue of the game is how unresponsive it feels when in combat. Expect to be hit by an enemy, get up and start swinging your weapon in melee and hitting nothing, only to be hit again and again.

The last level, is probably the worst in the game. It introduces an enemy that has RNG to its movement and attacks and makes it a chore when you have to kill dozens of them. Save points get really scarce in that section, and the game requires very precise inputs to not get destroyed.

Now, this updated version, and the reason why I don't really recommend it unless you are a very hardcore player or superfan: the game tends to crash when you die and need to continue. Also had issues with the save slot switching after reaching level 3 and thinking I lost my progress. It's a shame because they added achievements and some retro graphic filters which are nice.

Mind you, the expert difficulty and no rewind achievement is very hard, and makes the enjoyment drop a lot in the last levels. Proceed with caution.

I can't. I guess I don't have the nostalgia to prop this one up.

Awful controls, no music, slow game play and I'm pretty sure I soft locked myself in the first hour of play.

Also going into steam overlay or alt tab causes random keys to stop working.

Can already feel boredom / decay setting in, so I'm gonna shelf it.

Game is clunky and hard as I remember from childhood. 5/5 game.

A banger of a classic, even though in my opinion it always lived in the shadow of its better rotoscope brother Another World. This version works flawlessly in modern systems. It has the original and remaster versions. A must have.

When I played the original Prince of Persia games last year, I was enamored with how atmospheric they were, how clever and well thought-out every aspect of their mechanical and level design was, how strong an identity they possessed. There are a lot of weird nuances to their design, but the mysteries they present are all ones they give the player the tools as a player to solve, how to navigate their winding mazes and difficult combat and movement puzzles. They're very intuitive and fun games.

Flashback is not any of that. Don't get the wrong idea, the money you pay for this version is for the updated mode with rewind because much of Flashback's design is simply unfair, opaque and clumsy. As a release this version is... serviceable, though it has bizarre stability problems with frequent crashes reloading a save in the original mode, but as mentioned, you probably don't want to touch that mode anyway. Given the game's lack of any real tone or narrative identity behind its consistently poor game design, I'm really just not sure who I'd recommend Flashback to other than people who have a truly profound appreciation for its particular Amiga spritework and aesthetic, it just isn't all that fun to play or all that engaging as a cinematic narrative experience and even if you find any kind of charm in what it is, it is a game that only continues to get more frustrating and nonsensical to play the further in you get.

Back in 1992, when I first played Flashback on my PC, I was already a fan of cinematic adventure games like Another World and Future Wars. The French developers—Eric Chahi and Paul Cuisset—had a vision for games that felt more like interactive films, and Flashback perfected that formula. Its sci-fi narrative, clearly influenced by They Live, Total Recall, and even a touch of Alien, felt like something straight out of a dystopian VHS rental. As Conrad B. Hart, a man who wakes up with no memory on a hostile alien-infested Earth, I was thrown into a thrilling blend of platforming, puzzle-solving, and storytelling that was leagues ahead of its time.

What set Flashback apart wasn’t just its deep, engrossing plot, but its incredible use of rotoscoped animation. Every movement—running, rolling, drawing a gun—felt fluid and lifelike in a way no other game had managed before. The game controlled like a blend of Prince of Persia and Another World, requiring precision and patience, but rewarding the player with a truly cinematic experience. Combat was deliberate, requiring strategy rather than brute force, and the exploration-heavy level design made every environment feel like a real place. The cyberpunk cityscapes, the jungles of Titan, and the alien strongholds had an atmosphere that, even today, still holds up.

Revisiting Flashback on Steam brought back a wave of nostalgia, but also a few surprises. The original version remains mostly intact, but some strange alterations—like a new intro/menu background—stick out like a sore thumb. It’s a reminder that some things should be left untouched. And then there’s the so-called “remastered” version—an ugly, soulless mess that strips away the magic of the original with garish visuals and unnecessary changes. The beauty of Flashback was in its pixel-perfect art and fluid animation, and this "update" completely misunderstands what made the game special.

Even after all these years, the original Flashback remains a masterpiece. It’s a game that perfectly captured the spirit of 80s and early 90s sci-fi, a love letter to the kind of storytelling and atmosphere that made films like Blade Runner and Escape from New York so iconic. It’s rare to find a game that plays as well today as it did decades ago, but Flashback is one of them. If you’ve never played it before, skip the remaster and go straight for the original—it’s still one of the coolest sci-fi adventures ever made.

Loved it. I played it originally on the Amiga and it’s a classic. Never completed it though until today. Definitely a trip down memory lane! The animations still look fantastic and this wasn’t one of those “my memories of this are great and playing it now has ruined it” it was “this is just as amazing as I remember it!

controls suck!!!!!!!!!!

Flashback was one of my favorite games growing up, and it was fun to play it again, but I wouldn't recommend this version. The full price is very steep for what is essentially a port.

The reason I'm giving it a bad review is that the Morph enemies are really, really badly bugged in this version, to the point that it basically ruins the game. In the original game you can learn their moves and defeat them without taking damage if you're good enough. In this version, they can stunlock you endlessly with un-dodgeable attacks until you die, and there's nothing you can do about it but hope that they decide not to.

The hard mode is absurdly over-tuned, it just doubles the amount of enemies and makes them bullet sponges. That combined with the bug I described earlier means that if you want to beat it you're going to have to slog through long, boring fights, occasionally running back to the save point halfway through the battle because you lucked into a situation where you were able to deal damage to one of the six bad guys that attack you at the same time and could each stunlock you to death on their own.

Unfortunately one of the achievements requires you to play in hard mode, so if you care about that sort of thing prepare to be bored and frustrated.

Amazing game. One of the true 90's classics and well worth a look if you enjoy platforming/puzzle games.

yes

Nostalgic game for me. One of my first PC games

Игра состарилась не очень хорошо, больше культурный артефакт и памятник эпохе чем игра (Another world ощущается гораздо менее архаично как ни странно)

Works well playing on a keyboard and the animation has aged well. The graphics are still stylish and beautiful too.

Even as someone that played this game back then and still plays old games all the time, I can't really recommend it because it hasn't aged well at all.

The controls are simply atrocious. They singlehandedly ruin every every other aspect of the game.

The worst part is that they could have used this "anniversary" edition as an opportunity to improve on them; but no, they didn't bother. You can't even rebind them. So if you are a keyboard user, you are expected to play it using the arrow keys.

If you want to revisit this game, just watch it on youtube.

I loved this game back in the day on the Atari Jaguar. Love the remake

Classic

I classic that can be played over and over. They don't make them like this anymore!

I've played this game on the Sega Genesis / Megadrive (still have the cartridge), PC (MS-DOS), PS4 / 5, and now got the Steam version.

So, yeah, I kinda like it.

The game is fun to play, but it would be better if it was controller compatible.