Time Swap
Time Swap is a promising time-travel puzzler, though unfortunately the submitted version didn’t fully work. Ambitiously, there are five ages to visit, with a suite of locations in each. Presumably the puzzle would be to mark different figures out of place in time and then judiciously swap them to the right points. The player can mark themselves, so I imagined that this could be used to swap people to places where there isn’t currently someone there to swap with.[1]
Given the challenges of writing with the system, Lancelot wisely limited the parser and makes clear the exact commands that will work. There were some strong design decisions with the implantation: unveiling new time periods only as you found historical figures from that time. There’s a moreish quality to the exploration, with finding characters rewarding the player with new distinct zones.
While a good range of locations was implemented, the past is a sparse and static place, everything waiting patiently for your intervention. Story-wise, the opening goal is clear and gave a good initial motivation: find the time-interloper and restore the timeline. The villain may have been one of the static mythical figures (the wizard perhaps) but there didn’t seem to be any way of apprehending anyone. The time periods and locations beyond the modern day are imaginatively chosen, though one does wonder that the Age of Chivalry is also technically a feudal age, like the Feudal Age. The different historical characters and monsters were essentially collectibles, there was no sense that (for example), the dragon in the library really was wreaking havoc in the library.
The descriptions are functional and there’s some desultory scenery in each location. You can examine some of these scenery items in each location, but their descriptions are sufficiently plain that the player quickly realises they’re not important. The game could have stripped out the examine verb with no change. As such, the descriptions are primarily a backdrop for the more mechanical swapping puzzle, as there’s little narrative. That said, as a backdrop, it is nevertheless appreciated: much of the pleasure of exploration is in discovering the unexpected, and there were many distinct and unexpected locales.
The player starts with the challenge ingredient, the time swapper device. The use of the device is clearly explained, along with the other commands, in the help text. The implementation of one letter actions for the device (M, A, C, R) was a good bit of design and saved much typing. There were no unnecessary deaths or unwinnable situations, thankfully, but still in an interesting way, the game itself was in conversation with classic adventures. In the typical text adventure from the 80s or 90s, there would be a lot of wandering around places encountering an anachronist blend from the modern and medieval, mundane and fantastical. Your job in Time Swap is to solve crimes against mimesis!
It’s a tough challenge, working to a tight time frame in a difficult authoring system. Even if the cake didn’t quite rise in the oven, the essential mix was good.
Arkanen
Arkanen is a time travel game set on a space station. In essence, there are two different kinds of time travel story: the Historical Romp where the protagonist visits various times and places; and the Timeline Twist, in which the same place is explored at different times to change the future by altering the past. Bill & Ted films and Time Swap are Historical Romps, while Back To The Future and Arkanen are Timeline Twists. They both speak to different reasons why you would want to go through time: is it to see important and interesting and distinct places, or is it to fix something that’s gone wrong? Arkanen is more like the latter.
Arkanen has you muck about with a portal creation device which shunts you around a grid-shaped spaceship, including back and forth through time. I drew a map and experimented with the device a bunch, dying a lot. It took me a while to figure out how to proceed, but it all made sense when I figured it out. It was quite a satisfying puzzle in the end. The implementation was robust and the various possible situations that you could engineer through playing with the device were accounted for (or at least, the ones I found were).
There is something of a narrative involved in Arkanen, in setting up a stable timeloop. The player’s motivations are a bit thinly sketched, and the ultimate mystery remains fairly mysterious— but given the time constraints of the competition, these limitations are understandable. The logbook was a classic way of displaying the narrative, effective enough at showing the timeline and goals of the player character. Before you get to that point, you have to make some guesses, slightly more exposition would have helped smooth in: the protagonist knows what they’re doing, so there was no real reason to hide any of it from the player. Getting to the storage room is only mentioned in a message when you try to do the wrong thing— there’s no particular reason the player couldn’t just be told they need to get some money before they go.
The ship itself was lightly drawn, an empty space to hurtle around in portals. There was scope here for a bit more storytelling in the environment (why was it empty, what’s on the asteroid etc.), though the space was distinct enough for the purposes of the central puzzles.
The core ingredient was the Arkanen device. It had a distinct name and the method of using it was delightfully tactile, twisting, pushing and pointing the thing around instead of using buttons or an interface. It was fittingly mysterious. The actual time travel itself worked very well for the puzzle but somewhat underutilised the potential of time travel (in creating rippling change, in seeing wonderous time periods). Seeing the inside of an airlock on a different day is less interesting that seeing people and places where real change has taken place. A simple solution to this would have been to have more environmental change between the time zones. Again though, what is ideal in a long-form polished game, is not always possible in the breakneck pace of a week’s development.
Overall, Arkanen is a challenging little sci-fi mystery puzzle which is notable for embracing the paradox of the time loop. A piquant dish!
Having tried this with the fixed version, it apparently works a different way, but either way the idea is along these lines. ↩︎