Your Future Self

This game is extremely infuriating. This game’s main mechanic is “looping”, where you slowly progress down a dialogue tree until you either restart or try again. A neat idea, if it actually was a dialogue tree, when in reality, it is just a dialogue hallway. There is no real choice through the entire game, and the core game mechanic is just choosing whatever “tone” you hadn’t used recently, and failure to pick the correct tone results in wasted time. The fact that the failure to pick the correct tone, or simply not having enough points in a tone results in the need to reset the entire loop again is stupid. It creates the illusion of difficulty by wasting the player’s time while not asking for skill or trying to entertain the player during the wasted time. The worst part about the game is that it is supposed to be about "having a conversation with your future self", except you don't have a conversation, you just read about someone else having a conversation, since you...

A neat little time travel story that's marred by some really bad screen flickering and the like. No really, team, this was very, very bad. Tone down the blue flashing screen or turn it off entirely. And put up an epilepsy warning while you're at it. I can't in good faith recommend this until you do.

Wow, just wow. Playing this was intense, despite me not even really understanding the gaming side of it. It's not important, though. Put on your headphones, make sure nobody's gonna enter the room for at least two hours, better turn off the screen tearing stuff (it's distorted well enough without this option) and immerse yourself. I won't say more than you'll be talking to your future self about... stuff they did. I shouted a curse to the developers when [spoiler]the game quit to desktop due to me not wanting to condemn what my future self will have done[/spoiler], but it was a positively excited curse, so bear with me. The game ran flawlessly on my Linux system.

This took me about 70 minutes to beat, and those 70 minutes were very well worth what I paid here. The story is told in a creative manner that leaves you asking questions to the very end, and the dialogue system, while simplistic, holds up well for a short game like this.

This game doesn't make anything easy for itself. It takes difficult theme (time travelling sci-fi), superdifficult narrative means (psychologizing argumentative conversation), and adds experimental gameplay with rpg elements. Yet somehow still manages to succeed. Mainly thanks to good writing - it does feel quite natural, without forced or awkward moments and similar usual suspects of eyesrolling. I was interested the whole time and even enjoyed fiddly, but functional-enough mechanics. And hey, it's text based adventure with epic boss fight!

WARNING: If you have epilepsy or migraines, DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME. There is *no* proper epilepsy warning anywhere. And it really *is* bad. Despite turning off the scanline and screen jumping, it keeps turning itself back on. And there must be a bug, because sometimes even when you turn it to "Off", it keeps going. And there are entire scenes where you're trying to read text over an intensely-flashing/strobing background -- and this is unaffected by the scanline setting; there is no way to disable this. Contortionist Games Developers: Please, please, add a setting to the game to turn off the flashing background when whoever it is interrupts the sessions. I'm sure this is a great game, but it's unplayable right now for a lot of people who might otherwise enjoy it.

After finishing the game, I found myself surprised that there were so many positive reviews for it. Sure, it's rough and experimental, which I'm fine with. What is not okay is that the core narrative is fundamentally half-baked and unsatisfying. C- grade. Do not try unless completely open to having a lackluster experience that isn't even thought-provoking.

game like this deserve more recognition

I love the concept of this game, and it executes it wonderfully with its beautiful twists and turns, just a shame that the whole mechanic of "looping" can get rather infuriating at times and that it's rather linear [spoiler] which I find quite ironic, considering the fact that it's all about breaking linear time, but fitting to the idea that you can do whatever you want in the time loop and it'll just keep resetting until the desired outcome. [/spoiler] I absolutely adored every second I spent with this game open, ready to immerse myself in this world. The only thing I enjoy more than talking about the concept of time is a story-driven game, and boy howdy does this thing tell a story. One of my main complaints is that autosave locations are a bit hard to predict, making it hard to know where I'll have to pick back up when I sign off for the day. Maybe a little icon in the corner would solve this issue. Just something little, but not big enough to take you out of the moment. Credit whe...

I get that time loops are redundant, but this is ridiculous. I found this game boring, repetitive, and tedious. There was no guide, no sense of what you were supposed to do next--so you ended up in an endless loop of the same dialogue options. Terrible.