TIME BREAKER

Difficulty : 0/5 (Extremely Easy) Global : 0/5 (Bad) Let's just quickly talk about the positives: the game is beautiful and runs smoothly. It's short but the price is correct so ok. Now I know this is a small-scale project but that doesn't grant it immunity to criticism, I paid for it and the dev will never improve if the truth is never told (and this truth is not an illusion sorry). And despite the harsh review, I'll still check out Desordre to see the evolution. Every dev has to begin somewhere, ReThink is one of my favorite puzzle game series and it also had a kind of weak start. But let's get to the main point: why this game is absolutely horrible. First the "puzzles" are just ridiculously easy. And don't tell me there are several difficulties with the step counter, this is just an artificial way of increasing difficulty that is, I think, not fun in this game. It was challenging and kinda interesting in Portal because of the portals mechanics but here I just don't see the point especially considering there are collectibles to find. But the main problem here is not the absence of intelligence in the "puzzles", it's the way everything is designed to make you waste your time. …

Got it as a package deal with disordre. Bad choice. Puzzle/Platformer with horror elements. Terrible mouse movement is a problem in a game that's partially a platformer. Some puzzles are just broken. Some are so easy that it's not interesting at all. Controls and level design are the biggest opponents in this game. Story and voice acting are barely existent and progression sucks. Also, it's a bit weird how subtitles say "judy" but the voice says "joddy".

The graphics gave me a headache.....

I'm a bit on the fence about this one. It feels good to play, it runs smoothly, and it looks absolutely phenomenal, with the exception of a few mismatched aesthetic choices. As you can clearly see from the store page, it's about as close to Control visually-speaking as a game can get, and it even shares a few of the same themes. The two main problems with it are that the puzzles are dead simple and all of the dialogue is done using an inaccurate voice codec, which to my understanding is just advanced text-to-speech. As a result, I was able to blitz through the game with no interest whatsoever in any of the characters or story, and although I very much doubt this is the case, something about it just screams malware to me. I guess pick it up if you really want more of that surreal brutalist aesthetic? Otherwise it's probably not worth your time.

To be frank, the only thing this game has going for it is its visuals. The puzzles, as mentioned in other reviews, are uninspired and easy, with the occasional issue when you get stuck after failing to notice a cube or laser switch tucked away in a dark corner somewhere. The mechanic of having limited steps per puzzle is totally pointless, and doesn't even have any narrative justification. It just makes you re-do the earlier parts of a puzzle if you spend too long wandering around, which does nothing except waste your time - the steps to solving a puzzle are trivial to understand if you've done them once already. The narrative is generally lacking. Every NPC is voiced by text-to-speech with stilted delivery and inconsistent pronunciation, the notes have amateurish writing, and the goofy hovering text does nothing but undercut the horror elements every time it appears. If you can stomach all that, the game has some pretty stunning graphics to experience. It's blatantly influenced by Control's visual style, but the execution is so good that it would be easy to confuse some TIME BREAKER screenshots for Control itself. But, that by itself wasn't enough to keep my interest.

I am almost finishing the game, what a great game. I love 1st person puzzlers and this one is very interesting. I have never seen one with a horror theme. One thing I found interesting is that it also has difficulty levels you can choose so it offers replay value. From what I can tell, it seems that the different difficulty levels introduce hazards/traps to the map, the solutions still the same. And the graphics are just out of this world! I think this is the best looking game I have ever played, the reflections on surfaces is so lush, man - that marble? It looks beautiful. All glassy and reflective surfaces look so good. Nice work.