TimeQuest

I spent a good part of my early 90's childhood trying to beat this game with friends. The plot requires the player to rectify ten watershed historical events, covering multiple time periods and locations, which you can travel between freely. Most of the events require solving puzzles involving artifacts from, or interactions with people and things in, other times and locations. In the course of the game you encounter King Tut, Cleopatra, Attila the Hun, Robin Hood, Genghis Khan, Elizabeth I, Francis Drake, Napoleon, Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, and a bunch of other historical and fictional characters. Finally there is an epic show-down with the temporal agent who messed the events up in the first place. If you enjoy historical fiction, this is a must-play title.

Timequest is a classic open-world, puzzle-filled text adventure set across six different regions of the world and nine distinct time periods. With 50 different areas, each containing a handful of accessible locations, it is a very large game. It took me several play sessions over the course of a month to complete it. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, which evoked that old-school feel of working through puzzles and making meaningful progress each time I played.

On the Zarfian Cruelty Scale, this game is classified as "nasty," meaning you can encounter unwinnable situations. However, the game always informs you when you’ve made a critical mistake, which makes for a surprisingly pleasant experience. I always had a clear sense of what I was supposed to achieve in each area and what to avoid.

The puzzles are challenging, but they never felt unfair. As I explored more of the enormous world, I naturally solved more puzzles. Generally, the puzzles weren’t too hard, but they were clever enough to require creativity and thought. If I couldn’t solve a puzzle immediately, it was often because I hadn’t yet explored the areas necessary to solve it. Since there were always plenty of other tasks to focus on, I never felt stuck.

TimeQuest provides plenty of fun and clever puzzles through a light-hearted time-travel theme. The writing is clear and lean, with a bit of whimsy and irony, and the implementation is excellent, creating no game-play problems.

But, the game provides very little direction to the player, resulting in too many save-and-restore puzzles and a lot of aimless wandering at the beginning of the game.

If you make a log of where everything is, for every location and every time frame, before you begin actual game-play, you'll likely enjoy this large, puzzle-heavy text adventure.

TimeQuest is a journey through history in search of a madman who aims to alter it. You can explore 49 different timeplaces ranging from 1361 BC to 1940 AD, as well as your headquarters in 2090. The amount of areas available to explore makes the game somewhat imposing at first, and many puzzles require items from different time periods. Half the fun of this game is exploring all the different times and places, and realizing how your actions in one time period will affect another.

There are two main parts to this game: The puzzles that require fixing what the madman Vettenmyer has altered, and the meta-puzzle of stopping him once and for all. He has left you clues scattered throughout time which seem to point to his whereabouts and a method to reach him. In uncovering this meta-puzzle, the story takes a few twists and turns that make you re-examine everything you thought you knew. It's a delightful twist that makes the game even better.