Cycle

Ever fudged so badly in your relationship you wished you had a time machine/trinket to go back and fix your mistakes by actually doing and saying the right things to save what is almost lost?
This is something that Tiel doesn't need to worry about, as his grandmother left him a neat little pocketwatch, allowing him to save his relationship... if he plays his card correctly.
Through a thread of choices, your actions will determine which ending you will receive, and whether you will manage to save your relationship.
Still, regardless of the end post, Heron's criticisms only resonate ever so louder with every new cycle. Sure, you may be acknowledging eir hurt and needs, but are you truly doing this selflessly? Don't you invalidate eir choice, the one triggering the story, by going back in time until you succeed in your goal or relent in your defeat?
The game does not just do time loop incredibly successfully, it also raises quite the moral questions about slippery slopes when rewinding time...

This is a kind of medium-length Twine game with some nice styling.

It starts out with a 'my parents don't understand me' kind of vibe and has the kid running out to have an argument with their current partner, which gave me lots of flashbacks to my most recent creative writing class I taught in high school, as that's the kind of story the better writers would write (the bad ones involved Ninja from fortnite and lots of helicopters). Still, I didn't have high hopes.

But then it pivoted into a thoughtful and interesting story involving (Spoiler - click to show)time travel that made for an excellent game. You have the chance to try a lot of different ways to stay with your partner. Your character has real flaws and strengths and felt like one of the most real people in a game I've read recently.

I thought the ending didn't make sense in-universe, but makes perfect sense as a metaphor, so I'm leaning more towards the second point of view in my personal interpretation.

There's some fairly frequent strong profanity.

So you're this hapless guy, Tiel, who learns his partner Heron is breaking up with him. Luckily, he has what every jilted boyfriend wants: a pocket time machine! So he rewinds and tries again. And again. And again...

(Spoiler - click to show)From the first loop on, it's pretty clear that Tiel is a bit of a creep. This gets worse in one of the paths you can take, where you learn that he only got with Heron because of the time machine, which let him try to seduce Heron again and again until ey reacted the way he wanted em to. Not exactly the foundation for an equitable relationship. Here, the situation is similar to that first meeting: you can keep trying again and again until you hit upon the right combination of words and actions that will get Heron to stay with him. Or you can actually make Tiel throw up his hands and give up, acknowledging that he's being a manipulative bastard, and destroy the time machine.

That option is clearly the most moral one, but from Heron's perspective it's interesting, because none of that ever really happened, did it? Heron doesn't remember anything you do to em before a reset. So from Heron's perspective, the ending where Tiel convinces em to stay is just - "dang, my boyfriend suddenly turned a new leaf the day I was thinking about breaking up with him, maybe this can work after all".

And Tiel thinks it can, but personally I don't think it will. There are some pretty dark implications that come with turning back time to get a better result for yourself in a relationship. If Tiel does something awful to Heron in the future, can he just turn back time and be like "aw gee shucks that didn't happen" and get away with it scot-free? (I read a story a while ago that involved an abuser who could manipulate memories, so he could do anything to his boyfriend, make him forget about it afterwards, and pretend they lived a happy life together. It didn't end well.)

Part of me wishes the story leaned more into the implications, but Ending 1 is fine as it is, too. Tiel still thinks of himself as a good person, and resolves not to hurt Heron despite the fact that he's still the one with the time machine and the desire to manipulate people by using it. Not a great combo.

Anyway, fun story, and easier to understand than Primer.

Playtime: ~10 min