Time Trip

I decided to use the “10 Random Games” option on IFDB and received this as one of the results. I felt mildly obligated to write about it for posterity, so here’s the review.

Time Trip is a short (20 minutes or so) parser game where you play as a person who has been involuntarily selected to test a time machine for the government. What follows is a series of time travel vignettes, with the player encountering different obstacles to get back to their original timeline. Each vignette has a small amount of navigation and/or a light puzzle attached to it.

The game offers the following advice: “Don't be too literal. Yes, you would normally ‘push’ a button, but don't be afraid to ‘use’ a button.” You should definitely follow that advice; treating this game with “use” as the default verb (along with “take” and “examine”) will get you through pretty much everything. The game indicates which nouns you can interact with as hyperlinks, and clicking on those will tell you the language you need to use with them if you get stuck. However, if you are looking to this game for a particularly challenging puzzle experience, you would live to regret those expectations.

So, if the puzzles aren’t that involved, what else is there?

The game bills itself as a comedy, so I feel like it’s fair enough to evaluate the game’s use of humor. I’d say that there are a few funny moments that I don’t want to spoil—light meta jokes or misunderstandings about what period in history you arrived at—that I found enjoyable. However, this game about time travel is fittingly enough, dated. One of the first jokes in the entire game is that the player character has lost their memory due to, among other things, “exposure to [the] ‘Twilight’ audiobook.” If that’s not the most 2012 joke that you’ve heard today, it’s almost certainly only because you read the title of this review before getting this far. Twilight has gone through entire discourse cycles since then, try to keep up!

In terms of craft, a note that I want to highlight here is the vignette structure I mentioned earlier. I think this structure is a good model for a small-scale parser game, where each puzzle is in a self-contained environment that you exit upon completion. The time travel element also provides opportunities for some (bite-sized) interesting settings. If I were going to develop a small scale parser game, I would look to this chain of self-contained scenelets as a reasonable starting point.

If you have 20 minutes to kill between bouts of existential dread, and feel malevolently compelled to spend those minutes in 2012, you could do worse than playing Time Trip.