Scrapbooking isn’t a hobby that’s had much coverage in video games, but Instants sets about changing that. Instants is all about photo albums. After making a photo album for a family member, the gesture sparks a heartwarming tale of putting together photo albums about your extended family’s key life events. What unveils is a game that is part observational puzzle, part creative scrapbooking.
Across 18 chapters, you’ll be presented with a postcard from a family member and a selection of photos of a specific event or memory. The photos are not in order, and in order to complete the photo album, you’ll need to sort them chronologically. Some photos have writing on the back, which can give some contextual story hints, but a lot of Instants’ puzzle solving involves pure observation. Do clothes change? Does the decorated house have a fully painted wall? Do children look younger or older? Nothing is strange; everything is a logical observation, and it’s told by environmental storytelling. I really enjoyed the meatier chapters where you’d have upwards of 10 photos to sort out. To help you along the way, a coloured arrow hint system tells you if photos are placed in the right sequence, out of sequence, or have missing photos between them, but are placed correctly. Sometimes these hints didn’t trigger when I moved between pages in my photo album, leaving me unsure where my mistake was to fix.
As soon as you’ve got the photos ordered, the scrapbooking begins. Over the course of the game, you’ll unlock lots of stickers which you can place, resize, and rotate on and around your album pages. Alongside this, you can place patterned sticky tape, change the paper design, and write some messages with a few different fonts. Instants gives you more creativity the further you go into the game because more options are unlocked. Scrapbooking is optional too, so you can take or leave it, and choose how much time to invest in making things pretty. You can push your designs quite far, but oddly, the game doesn’t showcase your designs when they are completed in a meaningful way. I think I wanted more fanfare when a chapter is complete. Instead, you get to open a box of new unlockables, and gain some tokens to unlock some food and drink options to randomly click to consume whilst playing in-game. The controls are very streamlined and easy to grasp for scrapbooking, which makes decorating a doddle.
Instants is a cosy, uplifting, and syrupy warm tale of celebrating life’s best moments. The puzzles are enjoyable, albeit with a gentle wavelike difficulty curve. The scrapbooking elements are implemented in an approachable and optional way, making them a joy to create with. The general aesthetic, visually and musically, is everything you’d expect from a wholesome game. If you are looking for a family-oriented, gentle puzzler, Instants is one to recommend.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Instants is out on PC.
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