While the initial inspiration was a "stealth game" where you have to hide from your past self, that's not really how it comes across: my experience with Rose and Time suggests it is more about forward planning, creating the ability to hide, rather than purely dodging your old self. After just a few levels, you are juggling multiple versions of the protagonist and quickly becomes difficult. In Rose and Time, the player must retrieve crystals from each level - picking up a crystal will send you back in time and then you'll have to avoid being seen by your previous incarnation so as not to cause a paradox. Rose and Time (Sophie Houlden, 2010) is an interesting riff on the playback puzzle, which recalls those science fiction tales where protagonists are worried about “crossing their own timeline” and upsetting what they remember seeing - an idea stretched to delightfully absurd lengths in Spanish thriller Los Cronocrímenes/Timecrimes (Nacho Vigalondo, 2007). Talos goes a little further than most because your ghost self has ghost copies of blocks and fans - which means Talos playback puzzles are more about doubling resources than just about being in the right place at the right time. Can’t reach that ledge? You could if you could give yourself a boost. Can’t press two buttons at the same time? You could if there were two of you. The playback ghost will operate as if you were working with another player to solve the problem, making it local co-op for one. In Talos, you turn on a device which records your actions which then plays them back through a ghost duplicate. While some games argue this is “time travel” puzzling I’m christening these " playback" puzzles based on how The Talos Principle (Croteam, 2014) more honestly presents them. Today my mission is to explain why I hate it. It was the first time I’d seen this sort of mechanic, but unlikely to be a world first: Braid (Number None, 2008) released later in the same year utilised a similar mechanic.īut I’ve seen this design pattern again and again over the years in puzzle games. If you need to click a box 100 times, it’s a damn sight quicker if a previous life is there to assist you with the clicking. With each new life, the player is accompanied by the ghosts of their previous incarnations, working side by side to reach a common goal. In 2008, a recommendation on Rock Paper Shotgun led me to Cursor*10 (nekogames, 2008) in which the player has to make it to the 16th floor - but the player's life only lasts a short time.
This is the fourth part of The Ouroboros Sequence, a series on puzzle games.