There needs to be more co-op games like The Past Within. As my friend and I crowd around our respective Steam Decks on opposite sides of the country, we're poking at mysterious boxes and obscure messages hidden behind paintings. We're totally engrossed, gibbering at each other down the phone, asking about objects and items that might be related to solving the next bit of the puzzle. Before long, we're swapping notes about codes and what buttons to press in what order, decrypting the mystery that's unfurling across time.
The Past Within is insanely clever, constantly keeping you guessing about what's going to happen next. I shouldn't be surprised really – this is the first co-op game from the Rusty Lake team, who are well known for creating excellent single-player puzzle games, and its first foray into multiplayer is a triumph. It has the same interactivity and structure as the Rusty Lake series, but this time you've got to work together to unearth the mystery of Albert Vanderboom.
Future of co-op
The Past Within is an asynchronous co-op game, where all two players need to do to start playing is have a copy of the game each and good communication – no direct connection necessary, and you don't even need to be on the same platform to play together. Because of that, you've got to figure out what you're looking at on your side of the game and communicate that to your pal in order to progress. You can't see what the other player sees, at all, so unless you talk, you're getting nowhere. In The Past Within, one of you plays in the Past, while the other is in the Future, with the one in the Future able to directly influence what happens to the player in the Past.
While my friend in the Future was looking at a puzzle box that also happened to be a computer, I was in a small room in The Past. I could look around all four walls, and interact with a variety of items that I found, from pictures on the wall to a coffin containing the body of Vanderboom himself. It's part point-and-click puzzle solving, where you'll have to figure out how to combine items in a way that makes them useful, but also involves finding codes and other instructions that you can pass to your friend in the Future. The aforementioned puzzle box worked in a similar way to something out of a game from The Room series, as you could spin it around to discover multiple sides to explore, secret hatches to unlock, and other elements to poke and prod at until they reveal their secrets.
It offered up a lot of balance, as there was always plenty to do by yourself in your space, but progress was always gated by the information flow between us. Whether that was because one of us was missing a piece of information like the order in which to flick a series of switches, or we needed to know what item to put in which spot, the puzzles were always expertly crafted. It never felt cheap or obtuse in the way that point-and-click puzzles can sometimes be, but instead, it always felt like we had the information we needed, it would just be a case of understanding how to interpret that information. I loved how the two games regularly showcase how closely they were connected, despite the fact that they aren't physically connected. It was always a surprise to see how things we did would change the room I was in, and later how I could impact what my friend was seeing in the Future. How solutions unfold is regularly unexpected, and brilliantly sinister at times, with the story unfolding through each chapter, with small cinematics and other elements to aid the core puzzle-solving. It's seriously cool.
Short but creep
And that's despite the fact it only took us two hours to play The Past Within. Narratively it's wonderfully creepy, as always seems to be the way with the Rusty Lake games, but this felt particularly appropriate as we were playing it on Halloween, our ramblings only interrupted by the call of Trick or Treaters. And, gameplay-wise, it's wonderfully tactile. The touchscreen of the Steam Deck came to life for this one, with The Past Within being the first game from the Rusty Lake team to include 3D elements like the puzzle box I've mentioned above.
I've tried desperately not to spoil the magic and mystery of The Past Within, because so much happens in that two-hour runtime that it really is best experienced completely blind. When you've finished it, the game gives you the option to play it again from the other perspective, but also remixes the puzzle solutions so you get an entirely new experience from the same game and same story, which is a really nice touch. The Past Within is so good that it makes me hope Rusty Lake creates more titles like these in the future. It's so inventive and the co-op works so well that it's instantly shot into my list of the best games of 2022 so far.
The Past Within is out now on PC via Steam and Itch.io, as well as on iOS and Android.
