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Why You Should Play Timelie

Our time is running out

Games about controlling time are, well, tricky to pull off. Personally, I think that might be due to the fact that we struggle to wrap our head around time as a concept. Assuming you can walk forwards or backwards in time as easily as you can blink, it’d be a very easy thing to do to change the future. Timelie is basically about that as a concept but extrapolated into a fully-fleshed out puzzle game.

Your aim is to help a girl escape from a rather unsettling facility. It’s not just her you need to help though, as there’s also an adorable little cat who gets involved. The trick here though, is that you have the amazing ability to simply scrub the progress bar forward or backwards through time. You can then tell either of the two characters to do something, all with the aim of avoiding the evil eyes of the patrolling robots.  If you get caught, then you have to go back.

It’s a really cool system that sort of feels like you’re making infinite save states as you play through each puzzle. It’s so easy to zoom ahead and see whether or not your plan has worked, or to go back and find out where things went wrong. My favourite thing about the game is that it’s not all that long, which means you can easily get through it in just a few sessions. While I appreciate that some people like more longevity in their games, sometimes I just want to actually finish something without spending three days on it.