Back from/to the future.
InTimemelters, time is a shoelace.
It bends and twists.
What you’ve done with one part of the lace can effect the other parts in unusual ways.
You get loops, but also knots and snarls and tangles.
Sometimes, you get bows.
Timemelters review
Listen.
If my friend died, it would be bad: game over.
Stumped, my hands left the keyboard: I had pretty much given up.
My friend who had no defences survived.
I, who was out of mana, survived.
And the person who had come to our aid was…me?
Me from about five minutes ago.
Fittingly for such a temporally complex game, let’s start by going back a bit.
You play as a lumberjack whose sister, I think, is being targeted by the devil.
It’s magical, genuinely so.
It’s a game about being overstretched, almost constantly exhausted.
And it’s exhilarating.
And Timemelters is an almost-sequel.
19th century Quebec has become olde Scotland in the grip of witches and spirits.
You’re a witch who controls both time and space - to an extent.
So far, so Sang-Froid.
But then you drop into the action as a witch and you have much more than an axe now.
Double, triple, quadruple the firepower.
Crucially, though, it’s not instantaneous.
You still spend travelling time in the white void between each stone portal.
Time in which bad stuff can happen out there in the field, but also time you could use.
What I did was ingeniously cowardly, even if it felt like cheating.
Then I’d rush out and blast them again once they’d lost interest and were wandering off.
Enemies and skills are introduced slowly and carefully.
Then you learn about creating echoes, and what this does to the enemies you face.
Then you learn about protecting fragile NPCs, and then you learn…
Onwards.
By mid-game, I was astonishingly over-powered.
Lots of games can be complex, of course.
And various parts of Timemelters are actually things I’ve seen before.
But a couple of elements come together with Timemelters to make it properly special to me.
Its parts are lovely, but it’s consistently more than its parts.
(It’s beautiful in its way, too.
Nature here is bracken parting as you push through.
It’s snow crunching underneath your feet.
It’s night with the fire of a burning village sending sparks through the trees as you approach.
The people who made this have spent a lot of time in the solitude you find around trees.)
It’s strategy, tactics, and real-time action, it’s planning and sweaty execution.
But step back and it’s also just puzzles and combat.
And another different way?
But it also has clear rules for what fits into the timeline and what sits outside of it.
Open portals and they’ll always be open.
It’s a wild game empowered by some very clear thinking.
Keyboard and mouse can be remapped but gamepad cannot.
And the end result, for me, is that it feels like a genuine sandbox.
A game that works its way into your dreams?
I think sandboxes are a bit like gaming’s Rorschach test.
The term means different things to different players, and people react to sandbox games in different ways.
Like Sang-Froid before it, Timemelters has been the best kind of friend to me.
It confuses me at times.
But it shows my things that I could not imagine, and then it lets me do them.
A copy of Timemelters for review was provided by Autoexec Games.
