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9 of the best games with time travelOne Off The List
One Off The List
So let’s chronicle games about time, specifically those that prove the passing of years is nothing but a directionless tumble through the jelly-like substance of spacetime. Here are 9 games about time travel. But which of them would you undo?
Titanfall 2
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
In this alternate reality tank spammer, everyone’s favourite patent clerk Albert Einstein travels back through time to kill Hitler witha zappy handshake, making it the politest assassination in the history of Adolf-killing speculation. With no Nazism, the Soviet Union goes hog wild on Eastern Europe and China, munching up land like a communist Cookie Monster. The Allies get annoyed and war done get warred anyway. But this history-distorting device has bugger-all presence in the game itself, which remains classic RTS stuff. Onlythe Chronospheremakes use of Albert’s time-twiddling tech. And it’s only a flashy house that teleports a lone unit across the map. That’s not time travel. That’s just travel.
Life Is Strange
Day Of The Tentacle
Day Of The Tentacle is an adventure game of unparalleled intelligence and anever-betteredexercise of lateral thinking via the principles of causation. You travel through time ina toilet.
Final Fantasy VIII
Outer Wilds
Well done, videogames. It only took you 26 years to figure out that Groundhog Day’s conceit was perfectly suited to a medium dedicated to repetition and death. (Huh? Majora’s what? Never heard of it.) While theSexy Brutaleused a time loop to indulge the player in an endless murder masquerade, playful space exploration gameOuter Wildsuses the same gimmick to kill you with an inescapable supernova blast every 22 minutes. I know which eternal cycle of mortal anxietyI prefer.
Don’t worry, 22 minutes is plenty of time to admire the mini solar system, and travel to distant worlds where the sand from one planet falls unceasingly onto another in the shape of a giant hourglass. Outer Wilds is a game that understands the great calmness of non-existence, the sweet release of the coming nothing. All things must end, say the blue alien folk singers of this existentialist relief sim. Enjoy it when it happens. Sit down, roast a marshmallow, have a nice sigh.
Edge Of Tomorrow
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
Bold choice to make this completely hands-free, but the designers nailed it.
Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time
Titanic: Adventure Out Of Time
A point and click adventure in which an inconvenient bomb sends you back through time to save one of Hitler’s rubbish paintings from going down with the Titanic in 1912, thus making the artwork famous and prompting the anti-semite to continue his art career instead of his fascism career, completely averting World War II. All this without resorting to a single zappy handshake. Take that, Einstein.
One Off The List from… the worst Christmas gifts for PC gamers
Last week we lambasted you withthe 8 worst Christmas gifts for gamers. But you decided that one of them deserved more credit. It’s…the life-sized cardboard cutout.
“The lifesize cutout must go,” said commenter “Fnord73”, who argues that a six-foot 2D Batman can deliver quality entertainment, so long as he is “lurking in the driveway.” Fellow list-culler “Excors” agrees, notinga videothat claims cardboard cutouts are a bonafide burglar deterrent. “But it does depend on who you choose,” they say, “a cardboard Noel Edmonds was ineffective.”
See you next time!
