Time only moves when you do,” reads the elevator pitch for this gloriously stylish first-person shoot-puzzler. That’s a lie. It’s been a lie since the original version of the game a 15-minute entry in a pCgame jam was released. Time continues moving when you’re standing still, it just does so very, very slowly, leaving you in the game equivalent of one of those 1,000-frames-per-second YouTube videos of watermelons exploding.
It’s a fundamental part of what makes the experience quite so brilliant, too. If time didn’t move, you could plan every level with perfect, dull efficiency. but the fact that the longer you scheme, the more things will have changed including the position of insta-death bullets is the perfect antidote to a sterile experience. Inaction isn’t a safety net, but your most insidious enemy.
That’s not to say action sequences are easy. Dodging bullets is relatively simple, but chopping a bandolier-worth of them in half, mid-flight, with the new katana weapon is harder. Dispatching a corridor of crystalline enemies who are slowly but surely filling it with bullets and broken glass in the equivalent of a quarter of a second is seriously tough. Whether time’s moving or not, you’ll need to think far quicker than those bullets move.
It’s a fundamental part of what makes the experience quite so brilliant, too. If time didn’t move, you could plan every level with perfect, dull efficiency. but the fact that the longer you scheme, the more things will have changed including the position of insta-death bullets is the perfect antidote to a sterile experience. Inaction isn’t a safety net, but your most insidious enemy.
That’s not to say action sequences are easy. Dodging bullets is relatively simple, but chopping a bandolier-worth of them in half, mid-flight, with the new katana weapon is harder. Dispatching a corridor of crystalline enemies who are slowly but surely filling it with bullets and broken glass in the equivalent of a quarter of a second is seriously tough. Whether time’s moving or not, you’ll need to think far quicker than those bullets move.