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2018 marked 25 years since the release of Flashback on the SNES, and to commemorate the occasion the game has been brought to the Switch with a handful of modern touch-ups. The core experience remains the same though: Flashback is an old school adventure game that will thoroughly test your patience with clunky controls and obscure puzzle progression. This is one retro game that might have been best left in the past. Like a lot of older games, the in-game storytelling is somewhat obscure, despite promotional materials explaining much more of the backstory. As Flashback begins you're running from pursuers through a jungle, and then you're thrust right into the gameplay. It's a little disorienting, but by design—Flashback builds a sense of sci-fi intrigue as you encounter things like teleporters and hologram technology without any explicit explanation of where they come from. For the early 90s this might have been a novel approach to video game storytelling, but it feels a little dated now. Even by the halfway point of the game there's so much unexplained that it's hard to get invested in the game. It doesn't help that there's not much depth to the gameplay to latch onto either. Similar to games like Another World or Prince of Persia, Flashback finds a sort of awkward niche between point 'n' click adventure games and platformers. You've got some of the dexterity challenges of a platformer with running and gunning, but the pacing and presentation feels much more like a classic adventure game where you explore to gather items and unlock gates, flip switches, etc. The result is kind of a mess, unfortunately. Flashback has neither the depth of point 'n' click puzzles nor the fluidity of a platformer, which makes the gameplay clumsy and unsatisfying. The core of Flashback's problems lie with the controls. Every single action is incredibly stiff: jumping over a gap, climbing up a ledge, even drawing your gun is a slow action. The controls make the gameplay feel incredibly choppy, which wouldn't necessarily be a huge problem if not for the combat, which seems to demand much more dexterity than the game allows. Instead shootouts are stilted and awkward at best, and at worst completely frustrating. Facing more than one enemy at once is a mess since you can't move and shoot at the same time, and in fact even having your gun drawn means you walk in a slow shuffle. As a result two or more enemies can easily gang up on you, and the game frequently throws these scenarios at you—even worse, there are multiple times where you'll walk onto a new screen and immediately start getting shot at, before you even have time to draw your gun. More often than not it felt like I was fighting the controls rather than fighting the game's collection of guards and robots. Even outside of combat there's a strange stiffness to the controls, which also comes down to the awkward button mapping. The A button is awfully overworked as a means to run, jump, and interact with objects, requiring different D-pad inputs to change the action which are, naturally, incredibly easy to mix up. And because actions are so slow there's no fluidity to the platforming sections, which becomes a huge problem when you need to flee from a deadly hazard. Such issues are, I'm sure, a product of the game's early 90s development, but it just makes Flashback not fun at all in 2019. There are also some problems that come down to simple glitches, such as ZL not actually aiming the gun properly like the tutorials claim it should. Flashback's controls are a mess all around. The one saving grace of this 25th anniversary edition is the sole gameplay addition: the ability to rewind time to retry after dying. Dying is especially easy in Flashback, particularly thanks to insant-death traps or simply falling from too great a height, and the rewind mechanic is a true lifesaver—or time saver, since otherwise you'll be restarting at your last save point, which are relatively infrequent. On normal difficulty you only get a collective couple of minutes to rewind, but easy difficulty might be the way to go for new players since it gives an endless supply of the rewind ability. Flashback is still insanely tedious, clumsy, and unsatisfying, but at least with rewind it feels more playable. This version of the game also includes a handful of visual and audio upgrades, which are pretty underwhelming. Classic mode retains the pixel artwork and rotoscoped animation of the original, while modern mode throws on a few more modern visual effects and filters. The result is a look that is technically smoother and yet less visually interesting. It's possible to switch between the two at will though, as well as selectively choose to turn on the individual filters, so at least there's a bit of visual customization available. The game also offers the option of switching between the original 8-bit audio and a remastered version, but either way the soundtrack is so bland that there's little use dwelling on the decision. Some games remain classics by remaining unique and engaging decades after their original release, while others might have been original and exciting at the time but fail to hold together years later. Flashback is unfortunately the latter. Through the lens of modern gameplay, Flashback is just a mess of stiff, awkward controls and clumsy challenges, and even the new rewind mechanic can't quite salvage the tedium found in every moment of this game, from battling groups of enemies to just jumping up to a ledge. Fans who played the game 25 years ago may still appreciate Flashback's clunky old school charm, but without those rose tinted glasses modern gamers won't find much to enjoy here. Rating: 4 out of 10 Flashbacks