An incomplete history of time-travel games

Features
By
published

31 games, 3 decades, and only a handful of cowboy levels

Both Dark Cloud and Dark Cloud 2/Dark Chronicle take something of a throw-everything-and-see-what-sticks approach to storytelling. If your tale of imprisoned worlds and rats pretending to be genies and possessed colonels can include a few villains from the future or time-travelling amulets, so much the better, right? Right??

Did it do your head in? Neither dungeon-crawls nor city-building games thrive on their stories, so the baroque tapestry of story in Dark Cloud somewhat fades into the background.

Were there cowboys in it? Sure: Dark Cloud lives in a pokey Old West-themed ranching town, which he’s forced to rebuild when it gets stuck in a temporally-malleable hole in the ground.

Time Travel Satisfaction Rating:

See more PC Gaming Features
Tom Goulter
More about action
Screenshot from Twisted Tower, showing a first-person view of a 'Real Boy Station' vending machine with a freaky clown doll by its side.

OG BioShock director recommends one very BioShock-y Steam Next Fest game that already has 500 "very positive" reviews
A screenshot of the moon in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.

Despite Zelda: Majora's Mask basically being a horror game, one of its key devs didn't think its creepiest features were scary at all: "People on the team were like 'whoa!'"
Doom: The Dark Ages

Doom: The Dark Ages developers go back to the OG 1993 FPS for inspiration: "Every time you look at it, you learn something new"
See more latest
See comments