TIMEframe

Developer: Random Seed Games | Publisher: Random Seed Games | Release Date: 7 July 2015 | Genre: Walking Simulator / Exploration / Casual | Website: Official Website | Purchase: Steam

TIMEframe is one of those games where the term “walking simulator” is not being used dismissively or as shorthand for a narrative adventure with minimal interaction. This genuinely is a walking simulator. You walk. You look around. You discover artefacts. And that is essentially the entire game.

What makes TIMEframe interesting is the situation surrounding that incredibly simple gameplay. You are exploring the final ten seconds in the existence of an ancient civilisation, except those ten seconds have been stretched into ten minutes. Somewhere above the valley is the object that will eventually destroy everything, moving towards its destination in almost imperceptible slow motion. Water barely flows, leaves seem suspended in the air, and everything around you is experiencing time at a fraction of its normal speed. You are the exception. The player can move normally through this almost frozen world, giving you ten real-world minutes to explore as much of the valley as possible before the inevitable happens. When those ten minutes expire, everything resets. You find yourself back at the starting tower, and another ten-minute loop begins. It is a simple but wonderfully atmospheric premise.

The important thing is that TIMEframe is not really a traditional time-loop puzzle game. There is no Outer Wilds-style process of discovering information that allows you to manipulate events differently during the next cycle. You cannot prevent the catastrophe by finding the right sequence of actions, nor are there characters following schedules that can be altered. Instead, each loop simply gives you another opportunity to explore.

Scattered around the valley are fourteen locations associated with the civilisation that once lived here. Reaching them reveals fragments of information about its history, culture and eventual fate. These are presented through short pieces of text rather than lengthy exposition, leaving plenty of room for interpretation. Your discoveries persist when time resets, so there is no need to revisit everything during every loop. The objective is gradually to locate all fourteen points of interest and assemble what little remains of this doomed society.

There is a basic map, brought up with the space bar, which provides a rough representation of the valley and the relative positions of the locations. It is intentionally simple rather than a detailed GPS-style navigation tool. Discovering a location adds its corresponding symbol, gradually transforming what initially looks like a collection of unexplained markers into something more useful. The map helps, but exploration still involves a considerable amount of simply choosing a distant landmark and walking towards it. And we do mean walking. There are no puzzles standing between you and the artefacts. There is no platforming, combat, inventory management or dialogue system. There are no vehicles or elaborate traversal abilities. You cross the landscape on foot, reach something interesting, read what is there and then decide where to go next. For some players that will sound wonderfully relaxing. For others it will sound unbearable.

TIMEframe is absolutely one of those games that some people love, and some people hate. Anyone who enjoys slow, contemplative exploration games may find the almost complete absence of traditional mechanics incredibly relaxing. There is no pressure to master anything and no enemies waiting around a corner. You are essentially being given a beautiful landscape, some fragments of a lost civilisation and ten minutes at a time to wander around inside them. Anyone who needs mechanical engagement is going to be bored within minutes. Even compared with many other walking simulators, there is very little interaction here. Games such as Dear Esther or Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture at least use their environments to deliver an ongoing narrative as the player moves through them. TIMEframe is considerably more abstract. Much of the journey between landmarks contains nothing that needs to be interacted with at all.

The time-loop structure is both the game’s most distinctive feature and the source of its biggest frustration. Watching the final moments of the civilisation unfold at an impossibly slow pace is fascinating. As the ten-minute cycle progresses, the catastrophe becomes increasingly apparent. The soundtrack changes, the atmosphere becomes more ominous, and eventually the world is consumed before everything begins again. The first time this happens is excellent. The problem comes when the timer expires at an inconvenient moment. There is nothing quite like spending several minutes walking towards a distant artefact, getting tantalisingly close to it and then watching the loop end just before reaching it.

Back to the beginning you go. Now you have to walk all the way there again. Because your completed discoveries are saved, TIMEframe never wipes away meaningful progress. What it does wipe away is your physical progress through the valley, and those are two very different things. When an artefact is on the opposite side of the map, repeating several minutes of uneventful walking because the previous attempt ended twenty seconds too early can become frustrating very quickly. There is a strategic element to planning each excursion. Once you understand the geography, it makes sense to group nearby locations together rather than zigzagging across the entire valley. A typical loop gives enough time to reach more than one point of interest if the route is sensible.

Still, that does not make a poorly timed reset any less annoying. The saving grace is that TIMEframe is extremely short. Finding everything generally takes around an hour, although the exact time depends on how efficiently you navigate the valley. Achievement hunters also have a straightforward reason to see everything. The game has fourteen achievements, and the structure ties them directly to discovering the game’s locations and progressing through its civilisation’s history. This makes TIMEframe a particularly easy game to 100%.

Once every location has been found and the ending has been reached, there is nothing mechanically different waiting on another playthrough. The map does not randomise, the artefacts do not move, and there are no alternate character builds or branching narrative paths to investigate. The reason to return would simply be because you enjoyed being there. That sounds almost ridiculous when describing a videogame, but it is central to understanding TIMEframe. This is much closer to a digital art installation than a conventional adventure. The objective exists largely to give the player a reason to wander through the environment long enough to experience its atmosphere.

Fortunately, the atmosphere is easily the strongest thing about it.

Visually, TIMEframe uses a distinctive low-poly art style that the developers compares to early PlayStation and Nintendo 64 games combined with more modern graphical effects. The result is beautiful in a very unusual way. The valley is made from simple angular terrain, sparse vegetation and geometric structures, but the lighting transforms those basic shapes into something striking. Warm oranges, browns and reds dominate much of the landscape, giving the world the appearance of an ancient place permanently trapped at the end of a long day. The extreme slow motion provides the visual identity that the relatively simple geometry otherwise lacks. Water creeps through fountains and rivers. Vegetation moves almost imperceptibly. Particles hang in the air. Nothing about this actually affects the gameplay. That is worth emphasising. Despite time being the central concept, there is no slow-motion manipulation mechanic. You cannot speed objects up, freeze specific items, or use their altered movement to solve puzzles. The world moves slowly, and you do not. It is an aesthetic and narrative device rather than a gameplay system.

The looming catastrophe is especially effective. What begins as something distant gradually becomes impossible to ignore as each loop approaches its conclusion. Knowing exactly what is coming gives otherwise peaceful exploration an underlying sadness.

The soundtrack is arguably even more important. Composer Clark Aboud created a dynamic score using classical guitar, piano, and cello, with different musical themes associated with locations around the valley. As you approach certain landmarks, the music changes to complement what you are discovering rather than simply playing one continuous ambient track. Gentle guitar accompanies the quieter moments, while piano and strings gradually introduce a more melancholy feeling. As the end of the loop approaches, the music helps transform what could simply have been an arbitrary timer into something much more emotional.

Controls are appropriately basic. Standard first-person movement handles almost everything, with the mouse used to look around and the map available when needed. There are so few mechanical demands that anyone familiar with first-person PC games will understand the controls immediately. Movement itself is deliberately ordinary, however, and that feeds back into the game’s biggest problem. Crossing the valley takes time. When that journey is accompanied by beautiful scenery, and you are heading somewhere new, this is relaxing. When you are retracing exactly the same route because the previous ten-minute cycle reset five metres before an artefact, it is considerably less appealing. That single issue probably determines whether someone will ultimately appreciate TIMEframe. If walking itself feels like wasted time, the game has almost nothing to offer. If walking through a melancholy landscape while piecing together fragments of a civilisation’s final moments sounds appealing, there is something strangely beautiful here.

The closest comparison is probably Journey, not because the games actually play alike, but because both are more interested in mood, landscape and emotional interpretation than traditional mechanical complexity. TIMEframe is considerably smaller, less varied and far more limited, but it shares that willingness to let scenery and music carry much of the experience.

This is also what makes it difficult to recommend universally. As a videogame, there simply is not much here. You walk around a relatively small environment and visit fourteen locations. That is effectively the complete mechanical description. As an atmospheric experience, however, it is surprisingly effective. Watching a civilisation’s final ten seconds stretched across repeated ten-minute loops creates an unusual sense of melancholy. Every structure you encounter has already effectively been lost. Every piece of information you discover is an archaeological record of people who, from their perspective, have only seconds remaining. And eventually there is nothing left for you to do except watch the end arrive.