+ time-travelling through 2009 and 2010, help the people in the house to get what they want.
+ classical "search, pick, give".
+ sweet ending.
+ cheap (US$0.5, 50% off) for a 2 hours game.

- confusing map.
- mini action games in a puzzler.
- not an interesting time travelling story
- use time travelling to double the searching area for items.

Well... the trailer says all there is to know beforehand.
It's a pretty simple adventure game about a time machine, with little puzzles and some really easy and short platforming distractions from time to time.
There's not much of a story actually.

It takes about 1h30 to complete.

The controls are really simple too. Enter for inventory / objectives, arrows for everything else.
Inventory is automated, if you have what you need, you'll do what you have to without even having to look at it.

The graphics are pretty good IMO (I love that kind of colourful pixel art).
The music is generally OK.


It's pretty cheap. So if you're looking for a nice short puzzle game, just buy it.

Tick Tock Isle is a third-person pixel art adventure game that contains a little arcade-style platforming, too. I had a lot of fun with Tick Tock Isle and while it only takes two hours to finish the game, its price is very fair so I certainly recommend it to anyone who thinks they may enjoy a game of this genre.


Your name is Strike and you're summoned to an island to fix a clock in a mansion. When you get there, you find the mansion seemingly abandoned but you do find the clock. After tinkering around with the clock a bit, it teleports you through time to the year 2009.

In 2009, the mansion is full of life. You'll meet the ten inhabitants of the mansion and try to fix the clock - sorry, try to fix the time machine in order to find your way home. Soon you notice you can easily travel back and forth between the year 2009 and 2010. And you'll find that things you do in 2009 have an impact on the mansion and its inhabitants in 2010, of course. Could this be the key to fixing the clock and returning to your own time?

Tick Tock Isle is not a visual novel and the narrative is a rather basic time travel story, but its writing is entertaining and cute in its innocence. Strangely, although the game is set in 2009 and 2010, there are a lot of references to 1980s and 1990s pop culture.


Tick Tock Isle plays like a point & click adventure game but without the pointing and the clicking. Yeah, I know how that sounds, but bear with me here. You wander around the mansion, talk to its inhabitants, collect items and use those on the correct target NPC or object to advance the story. The only real difference is that instead of using the mouse to point and click your way through the game, you use the keyboard to control your avatar.

When Strike is near a spot where he can perform an action (pick up an item, interact with an object or NPC, use an item, …) you'll get an on-screen prompt and just have to press a button to have him perform the required action. So there's no pixel hunting and no 'using everything from your inventory on everything' in Tick Tock Isle.

When you press the Enter key, you see a status screen containing your inventory and a short description of each item you've collected, a brief checklist of things you're required to do, the current year and a crude map of the mansion. The map doesn't help much, really, but the mansion isn't that huge, so you'll soon find your way around without needing a map anyway.

On about five occasions, you're required to go through a minigame to get an item you need. The minigames are short, basic platformer levels you need to go through. This involves jumping (none of those insanely difficult jumps you need to time perfectly, though), killing or avoiding monsters, dodging bullets and even one 'boss fight' at the end of the last platformer minigame. Platformer games aren't my cup of tea but I didn't find these platformer minigames frustrating. It did take me a few tries to get the last two right but that's to be expected and part of the fun, as otherwise it would mean the minigames are way too easy.


The graphics are pixel graphics. Generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of pixel graphics but Tick Tock Isle's graphics are relatively easy on the eye.

The music is typical retro-style music that goes perfectly with the pixel graphics, and actually sounds pretty good. It reminded me of the high-end 16-bit console games of the 1990s.

The sound effects are also basic and retro-style. When a character starts talking, you hear a sound effect that sounds like the character speaks one random syllable. So there's no voice acting but this minute detail does offer a taste of the tone of the characters' voices, which adds a lot of atmosphere.


Tick Tock Isle has no Steam Achievements. It does have 10 Steam Trading Cards. You'll get 5 while running the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRoAeXkkWUU&list=PLIb_a695uFXCt9iv_GSt1P1QVmmFFfAzN&index=1

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I was rather excited to play Tick Tock Isle (TTI) based on its premise, and the impressively high reviews had me thinking it had packed great content into a small package. What I found was more nuanced than this, as I enjoyed the game, but that was in spite of its small size, not as a benefit. Does it wind up being a solid title regardless of its short playtime, or was it a waste of time?


I wasn't positive how TTI would play from the tags on Steam, but it's essentially a point and click kind of game. You have direct control over the protagonist though, and don't have to mash items together in your inventory to turn bric-a-brac into tools. However, you still talk with NPCs, doing simple fetch quests for them in exchange for items you need to progress, and find unclaimed objects which will be of use somehow.


There wasn't an option to play the game with a controller as I'd have preferred, yet it still worked fine with the keyboard. You'll sometimes have to jump for simple platforming, but none of this was demanding to pull off. Since you don't use your mouse to play the game, it technically isn't a point and click, but it plays just like one. 


TTI is a short game, so I don't want to say more about it than summarizing the general idea. You play as a young clock smith, tasked with repairing a large clock that takes center-stage on a small island. It's abandoned when you get there, so you go about your work uninterrupted, and wind up getting thrown back into the past, when the island had more inhabitants. In order to make it back to the time you belong, you'll have to navigate the clock tower and island, and find the missing pieces of the busted clock. The locals won't give things up for free, but by helping each other out, you'll get the items you need to fix the clock. 


For the most part, the visuals are pretty good. Characters have distinct designs, and it's easy to tell them apart from one another. The background imagery has enough detail to make it look like an interesting island setting, with the time travel displaying different times of day and seasons. There weren't many screens to contend with, but the different references to pop culture from the 80's to early 2000's was a nice touch. One detraction came from the husband and wife shouting at each other, as their open-mouths looked garbled on the inside, but everything else looked fine.


There's not many songs in TTI, but what's here is pretty good. Characters have their own tunes, with the two older characters sharing a military-style song. The music was catchy and pleasant to listen to. Sound effects play when you interact with the environment and objects, but this happens sparingly, so the game's audio is mostly from the music. Characters do speak, but it's only gibberish, instead of full voice-acting. I didn't even notice they were saying anything at first.


🌟 Though it still plays like a point and click, having direct control over the character felt like an improvement. It's faster, and I don't have to passively wait for them to respond to my beckoning.
🌟 The location loops around on itself, since both the island and clock tower are round. I didn't learn the layout incredibly well, but it's quick and easy to navigate from one area to the next.
🌟 TTI is very easy, as there are no way to trigger a game over or bad ending. I even tried jumping off the clock tower, for science!


❌ In spite of having a checklist, it wasn't always clear what you were trying to accomplish or how to go about it. For instance, I had an idea of what, "Stop the old war," was referring to, yet had no clue how to accomplish the task. I wasn't even sure if it was based in reality, or I only needed to clear up someone's delusional thoughts.
❌ TTI expects you to know Spanish, as there are some conversations with a luchador that aren't translated. It's not much, but when following what's going on and learning more about these characters, any roadblock to that is significant with how few of them there are.
❌ The game ends abruptly, and the ending wasn't very satisfactory. It doesn't explain or wrap up events, it just cuts to a celebration and stops.


🔍 Conversations tend to be brief, so it's worth double-checking with an NPC you pass by if you think you might gain something from them. If you don't have a new item or haven't gotten new dialogue from another one though, they likely won't have anything worth mentioning from last time.
🔍 The game shows an icon when you're near something that can be interacted with, even if you didn't realize it yourself, so be on the lookout for an arrow to pop up out of nowhere.


I find my opinion split on TTI, as I enjoyed the story and characters, finding them to be engaging and fun to interact with. A good example comes from the wife delivering a short poem that turns out to be a reference to Macbeth. However, the number of characters led to them having a smaller amount of screen-time and conversations, and the brief time with them seems quite shallow for it. Even the protagonist isn't above this problem, as we jump right into the middle of this situation, with no idea about his background, or how his clock-fixing job really works. Similarly, I thought the game worked okay as a casual adventure, but since the area you explore is so contained and small, it feels like you're repeatedly running around the same areas for a scant amount of items.

As far as figuring things out, I wasn't seeing the connection from one object or conversation to the next, so I often wasn't methodically or purposely choosing where to go, only stumbling around until I came across the right prompt. Overall, TTI is harmless fun, and has enjoyable characters. However, after beating it, I can only barely give it a recommendation, primarily because it's so cheap. The gameplay and characters are engaging for a while, but they aren't impactful enough that they'll stick with you for long.

I did not pay full price for Tick Tock Isle. I bought it in a bundle, and I'm sure only a miniscule fraction of what I payed is going to go to the developer. In a way, I regret that, because the game is so cheap and paying full price already feels like a great deal, given the quality compared to some other games on Steam in the same price range.

It's a short adventure game, kind of classically done but without those typical annoyances such as rifling through your inventory to check which random object solves the problem in front of you. The story and the mechanics of the game are built around time travel. You get some lovely art, pleasant music, decent puzzling, and some platforming, oddly enough.

Can't say much more than that. I would say the biggest fault of the game is that it lacks... aspiration? Everything is good, definitely good enough to keep your attention for the time you have to put in, but it doesn't wow you on any front. The story is not that deep. The puzzles are not that challenging. It's just a small, clean-cut, put-together game. Does nothing majorly wrong and nothing majorly right either. Worth a play, but don't expect something amazing.

Hello friends,

Today i will be reviwing Tick Tock Isle. A adventure where you travel thru time to change events. Note that there is no controller support, but for this game, you don't really need it since it is basically a small adventure game, not too long. You go around doing puzzles and such, with short ode's to old platformers mixed in between them. For me, the game was quite short and the puzzles are easy to solve. A perfect game to a young child who wants to stimulate their imagination and have fun with a non-complexed game. Anyways, here are my PRO/CON list.

PROS:

- A adventure time traveling adventure.
- Puzzles.
- Changing the past changes the future.
- Fun ode to old platformers and games when you are put in the imagination of two children thru different themed platformers like a prince of persia ripoff or a side scroller where you are a knight.
- This game is perfect for children. There is hardly any violence, and the few that is, is in the imagination platforming section against imaginary monsters.

CONS:

- No controller support. This is a issue for some people, for me it is not. I put this in the con because alot of people like using controllers.
- The game was too short. The length is not long, unless you get hung up on a puzzle.

Do i recommend it? This is hard because of the shortness of the game, but it was fun while it lasted. I recommend this game is perfect for young children. So if your a adult reading this, you may want to allow your children to play this fun game. The puzzle aspects are also fun in the game, but i found them too simple for me, but they could be challenging to new game players or young children. In the end, i do recommend this short puzzler game.

Tick Tock Isle is a heartwarming little puzzleplatformer with cute and colored characters & good example of what good pixel art is.

Entertaining and charming for its price. would buy more of this kind.

Just completed a run-through of the Tick Tock Isle. In brief, I would describe it as functional, but forgettable in pretty much every regard. The graphic are sharp enough for a 2D title but the music, SFX, character and world design is uninspired, both in terms of aesthetics and mechanics.

Gameplay comes almost entirely from the old adventure school of ‘use item x on spot y’, except the game automatically prompts you at interactive spots, and automatically selects the correct item to be used. This effectively removes what little engagement this style of gameplay can bring to the table, meaning that most of the game just has you running systematically from room to room and hitting the down key whenever it tells you to do so. There is minimal thought involved, and after about 20m or so, it just felt like a chore.

While character interaction is serviceable, the writing really isn’t strong enough to carry the game either. I didn’t feel particularly engaged either in the story or any particular plotline, and it seems that they didn’t really make much use of the potential their setting had to offer. You could probably call the dialogue mildly humorous, though it’s in the random/non-sequitur/pop-reference sort of way.

On the positive side, gameplay length is about 90 minutes, which, given the amount of content is just long enough not to wear out its welcome.

It’s not a bad game, but Steam has better to offer, even at this price point.

Disclaimer: The copy of this game was provided by the developer for review purposes, yet it doesn't affect my review in any way.

Few words about the game
The Tick Tock Isle is a short 2D puzzle adventure game made by an indie developer team, that's specializes in weird games. And they're keeping this formula in this game. You're a young guy named Strike and your goal is to repair a clock in the abandoned clock tower. But there's a twist - you will travel back in time to be able to do it.

Advantages

• - Plain controls, you're only going to use arrows and occasionally, enter to access inventory / map
  
• - Calming background music and sound effects
  
• - Fun and "differently approached" storyline
  
• - Simple yet lovely, pixelated art style
  
• - The price tag is 100% adequate to what the game offers
  
• - Long enough to have a bit of fun, yet short enough not to get bored of completely

Disadvantages

• - Lack of any kind of in-game option
  
• - The game is far too linear to enjoy it entirely, can get boring after a while
  
• - The gameplay and story are just so random, it makes no sense at all at some points

Summary
This game would be far more fun and would get a much better score, if not the linearity of it. Go left, go right, go left, go right, go up, pick one thing (just because, there's no explanation for anything) and over and over again. But I must admit, it's enjoyable anyway. Fun and randomness of characters and events is awesome, I've had a few good laughs. 100% recommended for anyone who's short on money but is looking for a quick, yet fun adventure!

Personal score

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There's a lack of appreciation for lovely little games that you can play in one setting. This one was very simple and sweet.
I want more of these, personally. :)