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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Perfectly Paranormal/Yogscast Games Released: September 26, 2024 Requirements: OS: Windows 10/11 Processor: Fourth generation Intel or AMD equivalent Graphics: Graphics card with DX 10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities, 2 GB VRAM DirectX: Version 1 Storage: 2 GB available space
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By flotsam Perfectly Paranormal / Yogscast Games This is a colourful bit of third person animated adventuring aimed at preventing Heaven from going bang. At its centre is a watch that manipulates time, which you (as the angel Cassiel) will use to turn it backwards and forwards in order to save Heaven in the six hours you have available to you. The watch sits bottom right, ominously counting down those six hours. If they run out, then goodbye Heaven. Which will happen. More than once. So beware. You don’t need to be too far into the game to experience the great degree of freedom you have when it comes to manipulating time. Need some more? Just turn it back. Don't want to sit around and wait? Turn it forward. You control how far and how often you go backwards and forwards, on each occasion building on what you know in order to achieve your objectives. What takes a bit more time (no pun intended) to appreciate is how you can most efficiently use those six hours. I won’t spoil it, but you need to be able to metaphorically walk and chew gum at the same time. There are rules when it comes to turning back time (just ask Cher 😊). The main one is that it gets turned back in space as well. Which means that if you wind time back to 12.00, which is when your six hours started, you will be back on the couch in your home where the whole needing to fix things began. You will have the knowledge you acquired but apart from the watch you won't have any of the items you might have collected. You will know where and how you found them, but if you want them you need to gather them again. Strategically gathering what you actually need for your next objective, as opposed to what you could gather, is important. You also have to play your way back through the events that have occurred, although your knowledge and the ability to brush off conversations and cut to the chase means it can likely be done a whole lot faster. Which is good, given the clock is always ticking, but might not be good if the character thinks you rude and you miss essential information. Like everything, it is an exercise in manipulating time. I liked this aspect a lot. I had wondered initially whether it might become repetitively frustrating, but it's at the heart of what is so captivating about the game. And I am still liking it, given I have yet to finish. I am determined to work out how to get to the end on my own(ish). The portals to elsewhere added another dynamic. You will no doubt determine a strategy, probably based on discarding one or two others that didn't work along with a couple of heavenly bangs (which gets you a little 'heads-up' with Death which can be useful). It’s a humorous game, not just in its dialogue. Funny is always a matter of taste but much here tickled my bone, wryly or otherwise. Scenes scroll sideways, and exit points will generally be ‘back of screen’. They will take you somewhere else, often inside a room or other venue. One of which takes you to a game of Florple, which didn’t do it for me but I appreciated the inherent humour (the game of Cups comes to mind, as does – somewhat perversely – Cones of Dunshire). You will learn a few skills as you go, and you will also be able to take an item into the past with you. That aspect is particularly important. The game plays entirely with the keyboard or a game controller, and whilst I almost exclusively defer to the keyboard, I did find the controller more suited here. There is some mild platforming involved, and a bit of doing things before other things happen. You can save at will, but you only have one save slot. Cutscenes occur, you choose conversation topics when presented, it is fully voiced, and looks and sounds as a jaunty animated adventure should. I am still liking it a lot. I played on: OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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