Paradoxical puzzler Induction pegged for February 7
Angular time tangles
I just spent the last few minutes trying to work out how you play Induction [official site] - "an abstract puzzle game about time travel and paradoxes" - by watching the trailer. It's very elegant-looking and I got as far as feeling like maybe there was an element of P.B Winterbottom in terms of time faffery but I eventually had to give up and started reading the press release instead. I've got until the Feb 7th release date to get to grips with it!
"You are given the ability to jump through time, and must use this to solve puzzles by co-operating with your past selves. As you progress, you must choreograph your actions across multiple timelines, and explore the counter-intuitive possibilities your increasing powers permit. You will learn to construct seemingly impossible solutions, such as paradoxical time loops, where the future depends on the past and the past depends on the future."
Soooo P. B. Winterbottom meets Monument Valley and there are no pies? I feel like that's where I'm at with this right now.
According to the blurb this sleek project is an attempt to remove the sorts of plothole which plague time travel in fiction when a universe's rules seem to get fudged to fit narrative:
"Induction began in 2013 as my answer to an argument over whether the plot of The Terminator made sense," says developer Bryan Gale. "I’d long wanted to make a game about time travel, but this solidified for me what I actually wanted to do with it, which is to give players an intuitive understanding of the weirdness time travel allows.
"It was important to me to stick strictly to what at least feels like a plausible model for how time travel works, and the process of making Induction’s puzzles began with having to discover for myself what this model allows. Each puzzle’s solution is then my attempt to bring back a discovery for the player."
Induction will be out on 7 February on Steam, Humble and itch.io for Windows, Mac and Linux.