It's February 27th and I beat Palette in about 5 hours.

Palette is a game produced in RPGMaker95 and released in the year 2000 and developed by Yubiningyo. It was also ported to the PlayStation 1 by game studio EnterBrain. You play as Dr. Shian, a renowned psychologist who is one night held hostage by a gun wielding woman standing just outside his office door. The woman's only request is that Dr. Shian help a blind girl with amnesia regain her memories. The game largely consists of Shian calling B.D., the young girl, on the phone and helping her traverse her fractured memory space in order to piece together who she is and why she's become who she has.

You traverse the memory space as B.D. jumping from memory to memory and breaking down mental barriers in search of key sensory memories that help you populate the memory spaces with objects and people to better understand those events—basically you are walking around and clicking on things. The only point of friction is B.D's mental stamina as each jump from memory to memory tires her out; when she runs out of energy the phone call ends and you have to start the process all over again with each core sensorial memory providing B.D. with more stamina to delve even deeper into her memories. It's pretty fun at first!

The game seems to involve a lot of trial and error, and that can be exasperated if you aren't paying super close attention or taking notes, you may find the bright red apple that keys you into another layer of memories, but now you have to remember where exactly in the maze those scenes are; it can get tiring. I recommend taking notes on how you get to each room and what outlines sit there so you can navigate much more easily. B.D's memories are also out of order, meaning its up to the player to piece together what exactly happened and why. The actual beat for beat of the story is really interesting (have to give credit to vgperson and their translation), I haven't played a lot of rpgmaker games that felt so interested in the social, they're usually so abstract or kind of mythological in my experience (to be fair this game does go in that direction). I won't say it really blew me away, the ending in particular isn't super exceptional, but it's really refreshing especially coming off of Perfect Tides: Station to Station and the accompanying dread of "video games don't seem to have the best writing across the board". This is an easy recommend and I love the awesome MIDI music that played at the end.