Toki Time Trial

Toki Time Trial is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from DigiPen. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers. This is a somewhat simple, low quality first person puzzle platformer with a time manipulation gimmick. The visual presentation is incredibly lacklustre. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a …

Toki Time Trial is a compact first-person puzzle-platformer that takes a familiar fantasy, stopping time, and turns it into the foundation of its environmental challenges. Developed and published by DigiPen Institute of Technology, the game has the focused character of an experimental student project rather than the breadth of a full-scale commercial production. Its modest scope works in its favor because there are few distractions from the central mechanic. The experience is primarily about understanding how objects behave, freezing them at useful moments, and combining that knowledge with careful first-person traversal. The ability to stop time gives otherwise straightforward platforming situations an additional layer of strategy. Moving elements are not simply obstacles that must be avoided or platforms that must be reached at the correct moment. Their positions can be manipulated indirectly by deciding exactly when the environment should freeze. This encourages players to observe a sequence before acting, anticipate where an object needs to be, and then create an opportunity by stopping time. It is a simple rule with enough flexibility to make the puzzles feel more thoughtful …

The gameplay was fun, and the notes were a nice touch.

Игра "Toki Time Trial" — увлекательный платформер с необычной механикой временного путешествия. Главный герой, Токи, спасает мир, преодолевая уровни, где время замедляется или ускоряется. Графика яркая, а уровни разнообразные: от лабиринтов до динамичных гонок. Плюсы — креативные головоломки, захватывающая атмосфера и приятный геймплей. Минусы — некоторые уровни могут показаться сложными, а количество контента ограничено. Подойдёт тем, кто любит смесь приключений и логических задач. Рекомендую!

I ran through the trials quite nonchalantly despite the timer; perhaps it was a mixture of the ability to stop it indefinitely and the effective yet deleterious sound design that led to me playing it so luxuriously, although it also has enough going for it that a repeat visit is an intriguing proposition. The later levels provide an engaging finale at any speed, yet for as minimal as it was, the micro-narrative in the help info felt left behind or truncated without as much as an Aperturian goodbye. The game is a Nerve proposition as old as time: maneuver a maze of platforms and obstacles with a timer stuck to your back. It's so ubiquitous it had to have been one of the earliest games ever invented. Pausing time, however, is different from pausing a timer, and I think the conflation of those two things needs reconciliation, because if your intention was to implicitly allow the player to not care about the timer, then the design of levels and the pace of the game could have executed on that rather than entirely retaining the tone of a "Time Trial." Something about the mechanical feel, specifically the discs, feels reminiscent of wonky free-form solutions in immersive sim games lik…

It's a great execution of time stopping. You have discs that become platforms in stopped time, and some objects move in stopped time. Short and simple