1. A first-person puzzler in the spirit of Portal. No guns, no violence, just… elegantly designed puzzles that requires logic and real world physics to solve.
How Portal didn’t immediately launch a sub-genre of platform puzzlers I’ll never know.
2. I wish there was a game where time travel was a core mechanic. When we die or get stuck in current games, we revert back to a save point, why not lean into that some more to build a compelling game experience?
As for 1), I think it did? With games like Talos Principle, Turing Test, Spectrum Retreat, and other like Antichamber or The Witness, there's plenty to choose from.
2) this is a mechanic in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, when you die you can turn the time back to the moment before death.
For 2. I think Outer Wilds and Deathloop are good recent examples that heavily lean into time reversion, but another example is Quantum League. It involves multiple timelines interacting with each other, in a very basic sense.
> I wish there was a game where time travel was a core mechanic. When we die or get stuck in current games, we revert back to a save point, why not lean into that some more to build a compelling game experience?
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time did something along those lines.
Outer Wilds too, although in quite a different way.
> 2. I wish there was a game where time travel was a core mechanic. When we die or get stuck in current games, we revert back to a save point, why not lean into that some more to build a compelling game experience?
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Shameless self plug, but I am currently working on a time-traveling puzzle game called Loop Thesis (https://loop-thesis.com) which features a completely internally consistent simulation of time that's constantly running during the entire game.
All of the time travel mechanics are emergent from that simulation, nothing is faked -- and the game takes that to an absurd degree, even the way levels are stored in memory is consistent with the core mechanics that the game teaches the player about time travel.
The point of having that kind of obsessive consistency is that the game is trying to feel almost like a textbook; when you understand the core mechanics of how the simulation works, if you think of something that you should be able to do, it works even if I didn't pre-plan it as a designer, because you're not interacting with a set of hard-coded puzzles, you're interacting with a simulation, and the rules you're learning are actually the simulation's rules, not an abstraction of them. It's meant to capture this joy of finding a complicated system and just kind of systematically picking it apart and then putting it back together again.
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The game also supports multiplayer (although I'm not planning on including that at launch), and the multiplayer runs on the same simulation. That means that if player 1 goes back in time, player 2 stays when they are; you can have someone in the past making changes that affect the future, and it all just kind of... works. It's a really trippy experience, at least so far in playtests.
And that obsession about internal consistency also means that modding tools work pretty well. The game's core engine is really fun to play with because you can just kind of change variables and build little tools and just see what happens. A couple of puzzles have come out of me just kind of noticing something weird happening, and then realizing that there's a consequence in the simulation that I didn't originally plan and then building a puzzle out of it. So I'm hoping that beyond the game itself that modders and level designers will have some fun building new mechanics.
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It's a top-down pixel-graphics puzzle game (not 1st person, sorry), and still in very early development, even though most of the core timeline engine is finished and I'm mostly at this point just fleshing out content and doing a bunch of work around that engine. The website (https://loop-thesis.com) is also horribly out of date, but I'll be starting up full-time development on it again soon, so I'm hoping to have more updates at some unspecified point in the future.
for 1, some games that I haven’t seen mentioned here are Manifold Garden and Superliminal. Neither are very difficult but both are very satisfying and well-crafted.
1. A first-person puzzler in the spirit of Portal. No guns, no violence, just… elegantly designed puzzles that requires logic and real world physics to solve.
How Portal didn’t immediately launch a sub-genre of platform puzzlers I’ll never know.
2. I wish there was a game where time travel was a core mechanic. When we die or get stuck in current games, we revert back to a save point, why not lean into that some more to build a compelling game experience?