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Paradox Factor

by Mike Walter profile

2013
ChoiceScript

(based on 1 rating)
1 review3 members have played this game. It's on 5 wishlists.

About the Story

What would you change? Alter your past and future in this thought-provoking and edgy time travel game. Are you willing to live with the effects that your changes may cause?

Paradox Factor is an interactive science-fiction novel where your choices control the story.

Travel freely from past to future and back again. You’ll need to use your memories of the future to solve puzzles in the past, before the probability of a paradox reaches 100%.

Ratings and Reviews

Intricate time loop puzzle game, August 1, 2026
Related reviews: about 2 hours

This unique game uses the Choicescript engine for an entirely different kind of game.

There is only one chapter. You play as a grad student interested in time travel. The science here is 'soft' science, with hints of hard science but mostly just 'cool science', which I had a lot of fun with. You basically take the idea of Schroedinger's cat and make a time travel machine based on it that allows you to remember the future.

From that point on, you have access to memories of different times in your life between 18 or 19 and 50. Once you've learned about your future, you have the chance to go back and change things.

This is definitely a 'monkey's paw' scenario for the most part (but not entirely). Fixing one problem can cause two others. Some whole branches can get pruned when you realize a person or goal is just not worth it. One particular scenario involving a farm house and a redhead took about a third or more of my playtime.

I liked the ending I had (named after the game itself), and peeked at the code for some other endings. I like time travel games a lot and the final results here were fun. The only drawback I can see is that there wouldn't be a lot of variation if I wanted to go back and replay; it feels like a somewhat ironically linear non-linear path to get to any of the endings. But there is still a ton of variation. I see the author has a lot of different games; I look forward to trying them!

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Game Details

Paradox Factor on IFDB

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The following polls include votes for Paradox Factor:

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Two that come to mind, which I haven't played in years and may be remembering wrong, are Moebius and All Things Devours. Games with fail states, by their nature, fit the bill from a mechanical level, but I'm curious about games where...

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