Time machines in fiction usually act instantly: the time traveler always takes the same time to reach their destination, regardless of how far away (in time) it is. Given that teleporting things around space is kind of a hard problem, it’s strange that scientists in fiction jump straight to being able to teleport things around time. Primer takes a more grounded approach: to travel 6 hours back in time, you must sit inside the machine for 6 hours. Maybe in the Primer universe there could be another breakthrough that allows for making faster time machines, where it only takes 1 subjective hour to travel back 6. Still, this voyage isn’t too interesting: the traveler must sit inside a tiny box, much like an astronaut. Which gets us to the main point of this post: what if the time traveler wasn’t confined to their machine but could explore and interact with the world while travelling backwards in time? This is the core idea of Tenet, a film in which time machines act only as “turnstiles” which swap the time direction of the traveler (from the usual 1 second per second, to a shocking -1 second per second). This intriguing flavor of time-reversed travelers can be applied to most models. Here are some games that do that:
Chiasm by Tim Fowers
Short puzzle game about reversing the time flow of yourself and other objects. The game uses the Record Clones model, but the Tenet flavor removes most of the usual fiddliness. It also has some Spicy Undo, with boxes immune to time-reversal. The logic is simple, consistent, and interesting, and the levels are perfectly crafted to showcase all the interesting consequences of the time travel model. Highly recommended.
Snakanake by knexator
Snake but every pellet you eat reverses the flow of time. In other words, around half of the Recorded Clones will be going backwards relative to you. At its core, it’s a memory game: without some recollection of when and where snakes are, they will seem to unfairly appear out of thin air and collide against you. My high score is 11. Somewhat recommended.
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Fun puzzle about visiting all houses in less than 10 seconds. Reverse the flow of time stay in schedule, but don’t run into your past selves! Short, expressive, and satisfying; not too thinky, doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. Extremely recommended.
Hourglass Temple
Block pusher with gravity (like these two from the Thinky Collective) where some boxes experience time backwards - turns out, there’s a big difference between dropping and un-picking! The clever concept, neat difficulty curve, and interesting puzzles make this an extremely recommended.
Fun fact: According to the creator, TopH, the game wouldn’t exist without my discussions about time travel puzzle games, so it means that the goal of this blog (get more people to make interesting time travel games) has been achieved! In a causality-bending twist, a good part of the reason of this blog’s existence and my love of the possibilities of time travel puzzles come from hearing the idea that later became chrontraption - an idea that came from TopH!
