Hindsight 20/20: Wrath of the Raakshasa is a 3D action-adventure from Triple-I Games with a focus on morality and the consequences of player choice. With a development team comprised of veterans from Sucker Punch and BioWare, including members that worked on Star Wars: The Old Republic, one would expect these systems to be refined, thought-provoking, and engaging. Unfortunately, Hindsight 20/20 struggles to meet any of those expectations.
The moment-to-moment gameplay loop boils down to walking between combat arenas and solving simple puzzles before ultimately fighting a boss. Bosses are ridiculously easy, as they generally walk up to the player character, Jehan, and perform a stationary attack that's easily dodged, and can then be attacked while they cool down. The hardest part of these boss battles is waiting for their health to slowly chip away thanks to Hindsight 20/20's limiting combo-based combat.
To do any substantial damage, Jehan must get a 3 or 6 hit combo in order to get critical hits and refill the special ability meter with Shakti. To perform a combo, Jehan must bounce between enemies in a similar way to the Batman: Arkham games' fights - but unlike Batman, Jehan can't build up a combo when attacking a single enemy. In addition, his ranged attacks, special attacks, and dash attacks can only be performed when Shakti is completely full rather than while it's filling up. All these together results in boss battles where Jehan's combo resets every time he hits, even when hitting in succession, and the special abilities can only be used once during the battle.
The main way to make moral choices in Hindsight 20/20 is in combat, by choosing whether to be ruthless with the sword or merciful with the stun baton. Some decisions can be made during conversations such as Jehan choosing to be helpful or selfish; however, most of these decisions either feel so far from what the player wants to say or do, or the player is presented with multiple options that must be cycled through because there's only one of them that progresses the story. For example, there's an NPC named Jared who was once close friends with Jehan's father, who was killed for a reason that's never really explained. Jared asks Jehan to save his loved one from captivity, to which Jehan's only two selectable responses are, "How did you know my father?" and "Did you try to save my father?"
There are many moments like this where Jehan's available responses have nothing to do with the question or even the entire conversation that preceded it. This makes moral decisions difficult throughout the game because it feels nearly impossible to know how the player's choice will affect characters, conversations, and the potential consequences. In this playthrough, the goal was to make peace between Jehan's town of Champaner and the town of the Raakshasa monsters called Gibsonia. After playing non-lethally, being helpful, brokering peace, and destroying the devastatingly powerful weapon held by the Raakshasa leader, the end result was watching a 3-minute long cutscene of the citizens of Champaner going on a genocidal rampage through Gibsonia and slaughtering all of the Raakshasa.
The feeling of watching this play out was confusing, shocking, upsetting, and made everything up to that point feel like it didn't matter. There are ten possible endings, but getting this one choosing to play a more pacifist playthrough killed any desire to turn back time and try again. This is a huge shame because Hindsight 20/20 is built on a new engine by a studio of industry veterans, who specialize in AAA choice-based RPGs no less, that unfortunately plays and feels like a game that has under-achieved in all of its most promising elements.
Hindsight 20/20: Wrath of the Raakshasa releases September 9, 2021 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam. Screen Rant was provided with a digital PS5 code for the purpose of this review.