It's not a bad game, but it would work better as a mobile game.

It basically plays like the tomb raider go game and at it's core is a creative maze. The story and themes feel a bit generic at this point in the game and the puzzles don't feel like they really do anything groundbreaking. One review site says it is a "nicely-made puzzle game" which it is. Windows Central says it is "One of the best puzzle games out there" which it absolutely is not. I'm also trying to understand why every positive review says the game is "polished". At this point in writing this review there are 9 uses of that word on the front page, which stands out as strange to me considering that the game doesn't feel particularly polished. If this were a mobile game it would be "polished", considering it is basically doing what tomb raider go did but with a much more focused style, but as a pc puzzle game it feels a bit repetitive.

So is it fun? if you like mobile games. Is it worth $20? Not for me. Even with the well-done style and design, the puzzles don't feel very satisfying when they're solved and the game feels too repetitive to try and play more than a few levels in a row. As a mobile game I could see picking this up every once in a while and beating a level to kill some time. I don't think that level of fun really merits the overwhelmingly positive user reviews. It's like 600 positive and 10 negative at the time of writing this and I think that ratio is due to a lack of exposure to a broader audience.

Sadly, the puzzles are quite generic. The intriguing time manipulation is just a mere way to recover from a failure, so what's the difference between save and load?

Bought this because of the cool artstyle, the cute cat, and the time manipulation, but there's nothing behind the facade.

Extremely average puzzle game. Puzzles are very easy and very repetitive. There is little to no story and the ending is extremely cliche and unsatisfying. I am thoroughly disappointed with this game and would advise everyone reading this to steer clear.

I bounced off this game almost immediately not because the core game seems bad, but because of one minor but infuriating UI problem: it's really slow.
The game makes me spend a lot of time waiting. Playing cutscenes that devote 30s to nothing happening, pausing for just long enough for me to start getting annoyed before every level. Trying to make me watch a replay after every level (skippable with 2s of holding a button after 5s of waiting for it to start playing...). And your character walks quite slowly during the level.

(I'd also like to be able to move around with arrows or a gamepad leftstick, but I could deal with "click to move." Couldn't deal with the sluggishness)

No.

I finished it, watched it all the way to the credit just to see if they'll show something that makes sense of it all. But no, all you get is a very vague post-trauma denial loop kind of story. All those long, boring and unskippable cutscenes (including the final fracking credits) to tell this?

About 2 hours of the game is wasted on such uninteractive storytelling attempts, which was a complete waste. From the remaining 5ish hours of puzzle solving, I would estimate around 1 hour of actual enjoyable gaming. The game is not just about its timeline gimmicks but also has gameplay related to timelie too, in the last few puzzles. That was smart and enjoyable, and also related to the story its trying to tell. But those damned cutscenes...

This game has a lot of promise, unfortunately the puzzles fall into the category where there's exactly one solution to each puzzle and you need to follow it exactly to the letter. This makes some puzzles very frustrating because you've solved it, but you were misaligned by one step and if you don't see the solution there's nothing there to help you see it.

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for November 2021. If you are interested in the game and it's before December 7th, 2021, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

A stealth puzzle game that’s a little too slow.

Timelie, at least that’s how I’m going to pronounce it, is a stealth game. When I play this game I think a lot about Hitman Go or Lara Croft Go. Slow methodical games that focus on puzzle-solving. There is also a time manipulation aspect to Timelie and this seems like the type of game I’d enjoy.

But after an hour I was ready to move on. I had seen a new character team up with the player, but the almost non-existent music, the boring levels, and the missing story just made me question why I would choose this over all the other games out there. There was very little challenge to Timelie and I felt like I had seen most of this done hundreds of times.

Pick this up if you want a stealth puzzle game, but I feel no pull to return to Timelie. The time manipulation should have been unique but just feels like a way to take back moves, rather than a deep mechanic.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my youtube channel: https://youtu.be/UKM-SE5rW3E

https://youtu.be/szGrKza78TA

Timelie is a game that I wish I could recommend more than I do. I’m generally a fan of puzzle games so I thought this might be very much up my alley. Don’t let the isometric viewpoint and the stealth inspired level design fool you, this is a pure puzzle game. You have to navigate your characters past sentries while using switches to lock or unlock doors and use one character’s powers to restore broken elements in the level to open them up for traversal. So far, so standard.

The interesting twist of Timelie is that it lets you rewind and fast-forward through time, so you can look ahead and plan routes around enemies, sync up your movements with their patrols and if you mess up you can easily go back and try a different tactic. I really like the way the mechanic allows you to iterate on your puzzle solutions very quickly and without much of a fuss. It’s a neat solution to the typical stealth problem of having to hide somewhere and wait in order to learn enemy patrol routes.

The first couple of chapters were all fairly enjoyable. I liked how the game taught me its mechanics and how it explored those mechanics with its level progression. The addition of a second character in the form of a cat that allows you to distract enemies, and who can crawl through small vents to hide from them indefinitely was really cool. Both character’s mechanics complement the others nicely. And I especially love the way the game introduces the cat by first using her as an NPC before giving you control over her.

What eventually soured me on the game a bit however were the last two chapters. Chapter 4 felt like the developers just grouped together the most frustrating levels that relied on a ton of trial-and-error and a bunch of almost frame-perfect timing between movements and actions and called it a day. It just felt needlessly annoying, so forgive me if I didn’t go out and download the DLC levels that promised even more of that frustration. Seriously, that’s how that DLC is advertised. It prioritized frustration by making the levels longer and harder to beat and thinks that this somehow counts as meaningful content.

When chapter 5 started, I enjoyed how it recontextualized levels from earlier in the game and tasked you with maneuvering through them a second time on an alternate route while your former selves are also present in the level. I appreciate the concept of the game recording your own solutions and playing them back again later for you to find an alternate route, at least in theory. In practice however this turned into a frustrating mess because there’s no 100% guarantee that you’ll even be able to make it through a level, given that the game can’t make sure that the path you took last time doesn’t interfere with the possible solutions you have to employ the second time around. This only really works if there is precisely one solution to any given puzzle, so the designer can anticipate your movements. It also robs the puzzles of a degree of predictability which, given the time manipulation mechanic, should be part of the core engagement of the game and it reduces every puzzle into a quick-fire trial-and-error session where you’re constantly doing course-corrections.

It’s unfortunate that the game falls apart toward the end like this. In more ways than one. Because even though the game makes it appear that you’re trying to escape from something here, there’s no narrative to be found anywhere. You could replace all the characters with random shapes in a blank void and nothing about it would change. Well, I say that, but that’s not entirely correct. The game does try to tug at your heart strings at the end when the cat dies, I guess, spoiler alert. I’m not sure it actually dies, but it has this sequence where the cat “sacrifices” herself to open up the final door and the girl mourns over the cat and tries to turn back time to get her back. But truthfully, I felt that the game really didn’t earn this moment, which is why I’m so nonchalant about spoiling it. To me it just seemed like a cheap way to elicit an emotional reaction from the audience. Sure, I like cats and I found her design and mannerisms cute in this game. But it just feels cheap and manipulative for a game to introduce something that a large portion of the audience is probably going to have a visceral emotional reaction to and then using that as an easy way to create emotional drama. Also, I’m not sure what that post-credit scene is supposed to represent where we get to see the girl wake up in her room and then get greeted by what looks like a prison guard, that just seemed like a total non sequitur.

And while I personally didn’t go for all the relics, which rely on you figuring out ways to solve certain levels with some kind of unspecified alternate goal, like not getting seen at all or not killing enemies, I looked up the secret ending you get for doing so and it’s just a short sequence in the hallway outside of the girl’s room where she notices a boy who is probably implied to be the cat given their identical hair color. I have no clue what the developers aimed at here, it just seems like tacked on bullshit that makes it appear as if the game had a broader point to make or an actual story to tell when it doesn’t.

I don’t often call things “pretentious”, but Timelie is pretentious. It pretends to be something it isn’t. Because what it is is a simple puzzle game. One that I enjoyed the first couple of chapters of but couldn’t in good conscience recommend because of the severe dip in quality as well as the quite frankly unjustifiable price tag. Yeah, you get free DLC with 30 additional levels that are apparently so frustrating that they take twice as long to solve than the regular ones. But that’s just that, more of the same and not in a good way.

Interesting concept, bad execution:

Cons:
* Gameplay doesn't affect story at all.
* Story doesn't affect gameplay at all.
* Playing back your gameplay at the end of a level should happen at double speed. It's way too slow and I end up always skipping it rather than enjoying it because of that.
* No rewards/benefits to finishing a level normally (no fanfare).
* No rewards/benefits to finishing a chapter (the only story you get is before the last level).
* No introduction to secret objectives (too bad if you missed some because you didn't realise they existed! Replay the chapter!)
* No explanation to what the current level's secret objective is until after you've already completed the secret objective (some of them are wierd, like complete the level without using X abililty or without being spotted).
* The chapter items you collect don't add to/affect the story or affect the gameplay at all.
* Selecting UI stuff with the mouse will often cause your character to start walking away.
* Switching characters will cancel the original character's movement if you just made them do something.
* Clicking on a door switch will only work if you're already standing in front of it. Clicking it when you're not standing in front of it will cause you to walk to behind the wall it's on.
* You get nerfed half way through the game where they (in a cutscene) take away your companion character for no reason.
* You can fail objectives on later levels by playing "wrong" on earlier levels with NO indication that an earlier level will affect a later level.
* Reusing levels is interesting, but having to replay entire chapter(s) in order to complete objectives in later levels sucks. (It sucks so bad it gets TWO bullet points!)
* The ending is one of those "oh you did this? Well psych! it doesn't matter anymore!" WHICH SUCKS.
* The secret ending is really not worth the extra effort.

I did quit and just look up the ending if you're wondering about the low time score. Because I didn't want to have to play through everything for the perfect ending and wanted to see if the game got any better.

I haven't tried gameplay like this before, it was kinda enjoyable.
I didn't really find most of the puzzles challenging. There was a couple but...

I think the biggest problem I have with it is most of the time it is just about analyzing where the enemies goes and finding a path you can traverse through that, there are very few ways to interact with them.

The central mechanic which is to rewind time (or see into the future) is not really that interesting, it basically just prevents you from having to start over. It's kinda like other puzzle games mechanics undo button, the only difference is that the plot recognizes you can do this. (if you ever felt like you needed a lore reason to have an undo button in your puzzle game)

The stealth also feels somewhat lacking. There is very few interactions with the enemy, and there are only one enemy type so you wont get any variation in enemy behavior either.

If what you are looking for is a game with time manipulation mechanics and puzzles I would recommend Braid and The Sexy Brutale, the later of the 2 even have stealth mechanics.