In games that have left me wondering, or pondering what the hell I just played. Someday You’ll Return is among them. Not because of the gameplay, but because of the game’s overall story and its various endings that have left me trying to rationalize what I just watched. 
In Someday You’ll Return you’ve left to go find your daughter who’s gone missing in some woods, you keep getting panicked phone calls from your ex-wife who threatens to call the police on you because she’s gone missing.
As you begin to search the woods for her using the GPS on your phone, you’re greeted by an elderly lady who gives you a cryptic message like most stories would do in such an event and you’re off to go find your daughter, tracking her GPS.
While you’re searching you’re thrown into random flashback sequences that make little to no sense early on. Things of horror and nightmarish design and moments like this continue throughout the game and if you’re clever you can try to piece together what has happened to your daughter honestly.
It gets dark, really dark, things involving rape, death, rape of babies, abusive family members, and the list just continues with suicide. Honestly, I was not expecting a strong horror game when I got to play this and what I received was a well-built game but also a game so dark I needed to take a break after a while.
The gameplay itself is fairly straightforward with its crafting system, and mechanics like most horror games it’s primarily about solving puzzles to advance the narrative. Doing so in this game involves crafting solutions from your crafting bench; the game even graces us with a tutorial of sorts to help players understand how it functions.
Someday You’ll Return takes the time and effort to micro-manage its details since you’re using a GPS device you can even use your phone’s tracking with a stylist to move around your map, answer phone calls, and reach out to people when you absolutely need to.
In my opinion, that’s a great way to add a deeper sense of realism to the game, whereas a lot of games have focused on bringing up a whole new menu to navigate. In Someday You’ll Return you are actively engaged in the world around you while accessing your phone using its light to illuminate dark areas and so on it’s a smaller overlooked detail that I think deserves a little more recognition.
One of the better things I love about the game is the fact that they have at least five different known endings for it which is why there is a large debate about what actually happens during the game and has left the fanbase fairly divided as they try to solve this mystery; one popular theory is that you’re playing a person who’s already dead.
But as I’m still progressing through the game, I’ve tried to avoid as many of the spoilers as I could. In short Someday You’ll Return is a unique game that has taken a lot of time, and consideration for how it was designed to create something unique for the horror-survival genre of game and it pays off really well.
I may be wrecking my head trying to figure out the narrative but it’s a game that I truly recommend.
An autistic gamer with opinions on games who also enjoys making dumb videos on the internet!