TAG
#time-manipulation
6 reviews · 4 essays
Related essays
The Verb of Cooperating With Yourself — A Puzzle Design Grammar From Cursor*10 to The Swapper
Cooperating with yourself is a more abstract verb than walking, pushing, or rolling. Comparing Cursor*10, The Swapper, and World 5 of Braid along two axes — how many selves can exist, and how many can be controlled at once — reveals what it takes for this verb to carry an entire game.
What Becomes a Puzzle When Time Rewinds? — A Design Grammar of Time-Manipulation Puzzles (from Braid to Timelie)
Implemented as mercy, rewind is just an undo button—but some designers promoted it to the center of the solution. From Sands of Time's insurance to Braid's rewind-immune glow, The Gardens Between's strolls, and Timelie's seek bar: a design reading of time-manipulation puzzles.
Soundtrack: Timelie — Rewindable music, built for scrubbing time
A girl and a black cat escape by scrubbing time itself back and forth like a media player. Under that board you hear piano, a music box, and — sounds sampled from an array of clocks. Pongsathorn Posayanonth and Aun Jessada wove 'the sound of time' into the score. Black coffee in hand, I take apart music written on the assumption that the player will constantly rewind, in a form you can carry home to your own work.
Soundtrack: The Gardens Between — Music that never plays backward, even when you rewind time
Even though The Gardens Between is a game about rewinding and advancing time, Tim Shiel's music itself is never played in reverse. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why 'sound that never turns back even when time does' works so well for a memory puzzle, through a lens you can carry into your own composing.
Related reviews
SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE
The sequel to SUPERHOT, the first-person action puzzle where time only moves when you move. It drops the hand-built one-screen levels for randomly dealt rooms fought in runs, and adds abilities you pick up along the way. The third game from SUPERHOT Team.
puzzlefirst-persontime-manipulationSUPERHOT
A first-person shooter built from white rooms and red figures, where the world's time advances only as far as you move. You take your weapons from the enemies who drop them, and a single hit ends the level. Grown by SUPERHOT Team out of a game-jam prototype.
puzzlefirst-persontime-manipulationPortal Reloaded
A free community mod built on Portal 2: alongside the familiar blue and orange spatial portals you fire a third, green time portal linking the present to the same facility twenty years on, and solve twenty-five test chambers by moving between them. Released in 2021 by the solo developer PORTANIS, with twenty cooperative puzzles added in 2023.
puzzlefirst-personphysicsTimelie
A third-person time-manipulation stealth puzzle where you drag time back and forth like a media player's timeline—watch the future, then rewind and rewrite the past—steering a girl and a cat at once past patrolling robots. Released in 2020 by Thailand's Urnique Studio.
puzzlestealthtime-manipulationThe Gardens Between
A time-manipulation puzzle in which two arrow keys and one action button rewind and advance time as Arina and Frendt climb islands of memory. You move time itself rather than the characters, unspooling wordless scenes of childhood. From The Voxel Agents.
puzzleadventuretime-manipulationBraid, Anniversary Edition
A single-player puzzle-platformer where you rewind, pause and bend the rules of time, world by world, to clear 2D hazards and assemble jigsaw pieces. Thekla's remaster of the 2008 indie classic — fully repainted, with hours of developer commentary.
puzzleplatformerlogic
