Time Rift

[h2] Thin and pompous [/h2] This game can get tiring quicker than you can finish it. The balance between its lack of level design and the over-the-top ambiance is striking. Puzzles aren't very rich and the time constraint is often the only element making them hard, but not interesting. Go left, go right, the visuals and game objects stay the same, each level is a succession of similar gimmicks crammed into tight spaces. So it's a small and simple game all in all, this is not really a problem at all. But again what I found irritating was how much effort was seemingly put into making it pass for something on another level. There is a disconnect with the vibe and the actual content. Hyper-on VXF for every little move, ear-piercing Sound Effects, excited music, unnecessary Voice Acting over long bland blocks of texts saying the same thing over and over again. Maxed-out form over function

The story is alright. The gameplay is uninteresting. The puzzles are almost universally trivial. It took me 2.5 hours to complete with all collectibles (missed only two achievements for doing badly), and of that 2.5 hours I had about 5-10 minutes of enjoying it in total. The same time-rewind mechanic is done in far superior free game "Beret" (not on Steam, available on indiedb) but as an incidental thing to make the game less frustrating, versus here it's the unfun central mechanic of the game.

I like it.

https://youtu.be/gLKsWW5-HVk Tight movement in well crafted levels with a little bit of narrative humor to pull everything together.

A fun little puzzle game with social commentary that is increasingly prescient. Worth a look.

Excellent and deserves more attention than it got.