Richard and Larry Build A Time Machine

SPAG

Richard and Larry Build a Time Machine belongs in the other half of a diptych with Vicious Cycles: both are games about temporal manipulation, designed to be played in a browser environment with an interface that simplifies away the frustrations of the parser. Both nonetheless retain something of an IF-style world model, encouraging the player to pay attention to individual objects and discover the things that can be done with them.

Where Vicious Cycles is polished, challenging, and disorientingly discontinuous, Richard and Larry presents a somewhat rough-hewn perpetually shifting narrative. A single scrolling page presents the story in its current form. Every turn or segment of the story can be interacted with at the same time: clicking on an event to undo it then causes ripples forward (and because of the time travel, sometimes backward) on the same page. It's a compelling idea, even though the story itself is not especially rich. [...]

-- Emily Short