Some games in the Record Clones genre impose an extra restriction: your past selves must not see your current self. This might seem like a small (and annoying) change, but it does imply a different underlying model of time: each travel isn’t creating a parallel timeline (in which your past self has lost all free will for some unexplained reason); it’s taking you to the same unique, unchanging timeline, in which you simply never saw your future self. This is an ingenious way to make a game based on the Closed Timelike Curve model without the hassle of controlling several avatars at once. Not being able to see or interact with your past self isn’t a requirement: the Fake Causal Loop model is for any games where the end result is a single consistent timeline, but that don’t allow the player to take advantage of the Bootstrap Paradox: if one locks their car keys inside the car, there is no way to receive from the future a copy of the keys, use them to open the car, and send the now accessible car keys back in time. This timeline, although stable (and a reasonable level for a Closed Timelike Curve game), cannot be ‘started’, so it can’t happen on this model.
Here are some games with this model of time travel:
Induction by Bryan Gale
I haven’t personally played this game, so I can’t talk much about it. It has a very interesting model of time, in which the final result must be a consistent timeline but you can use Standard time travel to get to that state. Probably recommended, will update this as soon as I play it.
Block Pushing Puzzle Game But With Time Travel by Robin Johnson
It’s a block pushing game, but… with time travel!. Being grid-based and having undo makes it much less fiddly than the average Record Clones game. It will take some active thought to understand what is going on, so you might be tempted to key smash randomly until stuff works: don’t. Overall a good game. The game feels more about learning general tricks and techniques than individual puzzles. Highly recommended.
Variants & future work
A common trope of this model is that the player will actively try not to see the surrounding level, to give room to their future selves. I think existing games don’t stretch this idea as far as it can go. In particular, I’d like to see a game about moving objects around, where the player might choose to hide an object in a box to avoid seeing it. So, in the first run, the player might carry an empty box from A to B; they then travel back in time and, without their first self seeing them, store something in the box while it’s at A and take it out once it reaches B. If you find (or make!) a game like this, please contact me, so it can be featured here!