A Potion Labeled 'Time'

A puzzler - indeed, a sequence of rooms with a puzzle each. The puzzles revolve around time manipulation, but not, I'm afraid, in any particularly interesting way. I don't want to get into details because there is so little here, what details I do share will just spoil it. It's an Infocom tribute, so it has a couple Infocom elements here and there and tries to evoke a certain minimalism reminiscent of those times.

It is not what I'd call a success. The puzzles are short and pretty obvious. One puzzle in particular involving a conveyor belt seemed complicated and turned out to be anything but; it served only to tire the player and make them think this is going to be quite complex.

The very first room is a Zork-ish pastiche with "ugly" before every noun (a strange choice which... only looks ugly).

I don't know whether I won. When I got a score of 16, an event was triggered which appeared to end the game; I was given a choice to quit or not, and not-quitting just put me in an empty room (with inventory items I was supposed to have lost during the event). The itch.io page specifically says "remember to use undo", which, if a hint, really should also be in the game or in a readme file or here or pretty much just about anywhere sensible; I am very much not impressed when authors decide to leave important notes on their website but not on their games proper. After I download their games, I'm not going to check their websites for instructions; I trust them to have the instructions on the game, or to distribute the games with the instructions and any relevant notes.

At any rate, "undo" at that point did undo the move, but I couldn't get anything to happen differently. Not to mention that that move exposed some pretty awkward writing that seemed nonsensical: (Spoiler - click to show)apparently you have a watch stitched under your skin, and at this point it is removed forcefully and you die as your guts disgust. Maybe the guts "disgut" instead? And where the heck is that watch anyway? I spent the whole game assuming it was on the wrist, but I don't think there are guts on one's wrist.

Either I completed the game, or I didn't because there is at least one more puzzle which I couldn't solve. If the latter, the game tried to be too smart and presented me with a situation in which it pretends to have ended... and, well, I wasn't really having much fun and I couldn't avoid that fate, so if the game asks if I want to quit, at some point I'll just shrug and say "yes". I think this is a cautionary tale for designers... careful when giving your players fake game endings, because they may believe you, or at worst see through your artifice but take the chance to evaluate whether they want to continue and possibly decide not to.

And if I did complete the game, I honestly don't appreciate having wasted time thinking there was a gimmick here, looking for stuff to do, just because the author didn't properly implement an "end of the game".

With insipid time mechanics, I don't know whether it was made under a time constraint that limited how much the author could do. Regardless, most SpeedIFs that I play are better than this; at least they have an ending, and a point to make, even if it's just a bland joke, or even if it's just zany randomness. This is a bunch of uninspired puzzles and an ambiguous ending.

I just don't see the point to this one.