Undo is a series of short mystery games, of the style where you read snippets of text in a non-linear order, try to piece together the story, and then answer questions about it. The central conceit is that you’re trying to prevent a death by traveling back in time and changing some small things in the past. Each box contains a single scenario that’ll take maybe 30-45 minutes to play (based on the one that I played: Undo: Curse from the Past; the box says 45-90 minutes but the upper end of that range is just absurd).
The game-play is quite basic. There are a dozen cards with a location+time on the front, and a scene of maybe 100-200 words on the back. One round consists of a player flipping over a card, reading the text, and then making a decision on what to change. The card will have three options. One option will be neutral and score 0 points, one will score positive points, and one will score negative points. In a departure from the standard formula for these kinds of games, you have to answer immediately after reading each card rather than at the end of the game.
The game lasts (IIRC) eight rounds, so you’ll never get to read everything. In addition to the main location cards, each location has a second auxiliary card that will give more information about a specific object in the scene. You get to flip over four of these during the whole game.
The system just doesn’t work on any level. There’s not enough text to start with (maybe half of what a Watson & Holmes scenario would have?), but it feels even more miserly since the text gets spread out too thinly over separate plot threads. So it’s unsurprising that the story that gets told is painfully straightforward rather than a mystery you really need to work at.
Multiple-choice questions don’t usually work well in these games, since the options basically always give away too much. That’d be even worse in Undo since you’re seeing questions constantly through the story, and get instant feedback on whether you picked the right answer. The way Undo tries to solve these problems is by making the multiple choice options vague and ambiguous. Even if you understand exactly what is going on in the story and what outcome you want, it’s often quite unclear which of the choices will have that effect.
It doesn’t help that after choosing the answer, you get just the score as feedback. It’s sterile and unsatisfactory. If there was a bit of narrative for each result, maybe the results wouldn’t feel quite so arbitrary. At least there would be some insight into what kind of logic the authors were following.
Undo is not worth the time, nor the money.