Kind of an inofficial sequel to Another World, Flashback seems to have been less successful on its original Amiga platform than later on the PC, where it was ported 1993 and re-released 1994 on CD. At least you find little info about it on Amiga sites.
Flashback is one of those games I once bought but never played. I have quite a number of them lying around, usually found in bargain bins. From what I read about it, it may remain in this category forever. Not that it's supposed to be a bad game, mind you, just not a type of game that appeals to me.
Although usually categorized as an adventure game, Flashback has many aspects of a side-scrolling platformer. Staying alive is what it's mostly about, and dying is annoying since there are only few savepoints. It might be a good idea to play it in the SNES version, where the emulator does the saving for you.
If you like this kind of game, play it, it's one of the best of its genre. Unfortunately, I don't. Which is actually a bit of a pity, for the graphics are really spectacular.
On the NEC PC-9801, the higher resolution proved a reasonable compensation for the lower color depth.
As with its spiritual predecessor Out of This World, Flashback features life-like animations, well-crafted cinematic cutscenes, and tons of atmosphere. But despite better graphics and longer levels, Flashback isn't quite as fun as Out of This World in several ways. For starters, the "puzzles" are somewhat repetitive, as most of them focus on getting Conrad from one point to another by pressing a button or throwing switches. Although there are objects you can pick up and store in your inventory, most of their uses are so obvious that adventure gamers won't even consider them "puzzle" at all. Furthermore, the game inherits Out of This World's save-only-at-save-point feature, but it is more frustrating this time around because most levels are much larger and more difficult. This means that if you die, you might have to spend hours retracing your steps, all the time hoping that you'd get to a new save point before the health meter goes to zero. Although this "realism" may appeal to some gamers, most of us who are not joystick gods will find it very irritating.
I remember when I first found the demo of this game a while ago. I loved it but decided I would like it better on the SuperNES. So I found the SNES version at the local FuncoLand and… well… it was terrible. The controller wasn't really any improvment over the keyboard and you can't save so you have to remember those stupid passwords. Plus, the sound was only slightly more appealing then a cat in a blender. I don't know why, but the only semi-annoying beeps and hums in the Mac version was enough to make me play with the sound off on the SNES. Plus, the animations, which were very fluent on the Mac, were crazy slow and you actually had to wait a few seconds until the next screen appeared! That sucks in an action game especially. Needless to say, I didn't play it very much and it got abandoned before I got very far in the game at all. This is why I was pretty excited to find the Mac version here.This game is great. The graphics are nothing special but like I said the animations look really nice. The gameplay is very inspired, not your average shoot stuff and jump to the next platform game. It can be very, very frustrating at times, even on the Easy difficulty. I got pretty pissed a few times when I had to do the same thing over and over just because every new screen I got to there was something I wouldn't expect and have to do again once I knew about it. But, the otherwise fun gameplay and interesting storyline (the game throws you in the middle of this weird sci-fi story forcing you to piece together what's going on; a very nice touch) kept me playing. I give this five stars. One of the better games available on this site.
