Dodging Bullets, Stealing Guns and Reversing Death - Time Manipulation in Gaming

The winner of this year's 7 Day FPS Challenge hosted by Steam is a tech demo called SuperHot. SuperHot takes place in a strange, Art Deco world where faceless people try to kill you. The premise is interesting enough even before it's novel game mechanic is explained in big, white letters at the start of the game: "Time Moves When You Move". SuperHot's brilliant use of time manipulation is the latest in a long line of games. Here, in chronological order, are five of the most important ones:

  

Max Payne (1999, Remedy)

Max Payne’s story comes straight out of a Charles Bronson film: a man descends into a criminal underworld to hunt down his wife and newborn baby’s killers. However, its most notable feature – “bullet time” - is inspired by old John Woo films. Although it isn’t the earliest example of time manipulation in gaming, it certainly is the most notable. “Bullet time” itself is fairly simple: killing enemies fills a sidebar which, when filled, lets you enter slow motion. This gives you ample time to gun down enemies or slo-mo your way through a room. The mechanic also gave rise to one of the greatest conundrums of our century: “Can I take out this room of mooks with just one artsy bullet time dive to the left?” 

Blinx: The Time Sweeper (2002, Artoon)

In case you didn’t know, Blinx was Microsoft’s attempt at rivalling Sega’s Sonic and Nintendo’s Mario. Blinx is a big anthropomorphic orange cat who has to save a helpless dimension from evil Time Monsters with his trusty vacuum cleaner Time Sweeper. It’s with this fancy piece of technology that Blinx picks up time crystals and gets access to his time bending powers (fast forwarding, reversing, stopping and even recording time). The mechanic is mainly used to get past obstacles (reverse time on a collapsed bridge to put it back together) and enemies (freeze time to dispatch all your enemies in one go). Unfortunately, despite its interesting mechanic, the game was a bit clunky and didn’t turn into the Xbox mascot that Microsoft had hoped for. Gamers just weren’t ready for the idea of housework being used to save the world. 

Prince of Perisa: Sands of Time (2003, Ubisoft)

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was Ubisoft’s reimagining of the 1990s Prince of Persia series. The story has an arrogant young prince releasing the sands of time across his father’s palace. Luckily, he also has a stolen time dagger which can stab sand-ified enemies to give him access to the time sand. The dagger allows him to manipulate time, reversing, fast forwarding, slowing down and pausing to get past game puzzles. A rotating beheader can be passed more easily when time is slowed down. A mistimed jump or swing where you fall to your death can be reversed and tried again. Of course, you have to make sure you have enough time sand with you or you'll find yourself only reversing time to the midpoint of your death-jump. All in all, Prince of Perisa proved to be a more successful version of Blinx, codifying the time manipulation mechanic into something more fun and palatable.

Timeshift (2007, Saber Interactive)

Whereas before, time manipulation was mainly confined to action adventure games, Timeshift marked the first notable appearance in a first person shooter. The plot is that scientists have perfected time travel using “time suits”. An Evil Scientist™ inevitably steals one of these suits and alters the past for his own nefarious purposes. The unnamed protagonist, a Good Scientist™, follows him back in another time suit to stop him. The time suit gives the protagonist the ability to use standard time-bending powers: slow, stop and reverse. With it, he can dodge projectiles, steal enemy weapons and take down rooms full of enemies. Compared to the other examples, Timeshift is not the most innovative. However, when you consider it’s a game where you get to travel back in time and kill what are basically Nazis, the game and its mechanic become incredibly important.

Braid (2008, Number None Inc.)

Braid brought the time-bending mechanic to a completely different genre: puzzle platformers. The story revolves around Tim who has to rescue a princess from goblins. To do this, he has to travel to different worlds, where time is being manipulated in different ways. In one world, everything is really slowed down. In another, walking left speeds everything up. What marks Braid out from other time bending games is that the time mechanic isn’t switched on. Instead, the time bending is always affecting the player which means that you make use of the weird effects to complete the puzzles. The mechanic itself and its unique solutions caused quite a sensation in gaming. It also reminded people that you could play games that made no sense at all.  

With all these different games, what is it that makes SuperHot innovative? Essentially, it’s  a puzzle game where you get to gun people down, combining the first person aspects of Timeshift with the puzzles of Braid. Overall, it’s an interesting take on the time manipulation mechanic and one that will hopefully be successful in the future. It might even inspire other people to use time bending in more weird and wonderful ways. For now, though, we have the techdemo to play which will tide us over until SuperHot's release date. If you’ve got a few minutes, go play it and enjoy the amazingness of time bending.  

Featured Images: superhotgame.com, Rockstar Games, Microsoft, Eidos, Sierra Entertainment, Numbernone Inc