Trace Memory looks to be appealing to a very specific crowd. The mysterious story involves a girl whose father died a when she was four only to send her a mysterious gadget (a DS) a decade later. When the player begins, the girl has arrived at a mysterious, remote island, formerly owned by the late Edward brothers, and her little sister has gone missing.

Alluding to the point-and-click PC games of yesteryear, the upper screen displays important aspects of the scenery as you move around in a 3D overhead world on the lower screen. All interaction with the game uses the stylus: the player touches the location he wants her to move towards, and taps the magnifying glass to investigate the immediate area displayed on the top screen.

When investigating, the image displayed on the top screen moves to the bottom screen, where the player double-taps (or taps, then uses the magnifying glass) items in the environment. Sometimes the girl will comment on the scenery, and sometimes an event will occur. Most puzzles look to be standard point-and-click fare: drag and rotate items, pull levers, etc. Others are a little different. For instance, the player must push a boulder to the side with the stylus in one spot, and scrape rust off of a sign in another. Scratching slowly is far more effective for both situations, and players on the floor became frustrated because they tried to scratch too quickly.

Discouragingly, I had trouble figuring out what to do in the demo, described by a Nintendo representative as five minutes long. I wasn’t alone either: I watched someone play for fifteen minutes before I started over. This is hardly unique within the genre, though, so it probably isn’t a deterrent to those interested in the game.