EDIT: I just noticed something, there are many paid fake reviews of this game on steam, which is why it skewed the ratings to "Mostly Positive"

Please keep in mind this scummy tactic before you choose to support this creator.

Original Review:
There are way too many jarring problems with these game. To name a few that stood out the most:

* Launching the game in VR, you need to remove your headset and start the game via the unity startup box in your desktop monitor
* You're put directly in a dark room with flags for language that is way too close to your face
* You have absolutely no indicator what you're actually supposed to do and the hints/prompts are extremely vague
* That pretty much means you just randomly try ♥♥♥♥ and realise "Oh, so i can do that apparently)
* Also there are no menus, options or any UI at all to access and tweak settings.
* The "puzzles" in the game are so poorly done... It is either really boring/uninteresting (Match these items to the picture) or it is extremely unintuitive/senseless (Shoot your arrow at this random target/find the key which is hidden in a location you cant actually walk too)

Now the worse offender of all, is how useless a lot of what is touted or advertised in this game actually is. The following actions add literally 0 value to the game:

* The ability to freeze time - Has absolutely no use
* The ability to rewind time - The only time to use this is if you chucked something important into the abyss
* The ability to shoot arrows - Combat looks more like it was slapped together with whatever just so they can advertise there is combat. Removing these element would change pretty much nothing.

The game was released in 2017 and the end of the game advertises more levels. Considering its 2021 i think its safe to say that was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

On top of that, time taken to complete this game, including me faffing about, was 0.6 hour... Id like to point out this game is advertised at $10. If you could miraculously know what to do and didnt faff around, it would take approximately 20 minutes to FULLY complete the game.

Overall, the concept is interesting and could do with a lot of polish and extension but the game advertised here is complete and utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Does not work with quest 2 controllers

A bit misleading - this is actually a pretty straightforward 'room escape' type puzzle with a core gimmick of moving between parallel worlds (different times). There is no usage of the freeze time power. The archery mechanic is literally just Valves longbow tech demo, with only a few enemies total in the game (12+1 bigger-and-more-health 'boss', iirc), none of whom pose any actual threat (or maybe I've just played too much Longbow already).

As a room escape puzzle, it's not terrible, but also not especially significant or clever relative to the many free experiences, which puts me in the too-common position of having to make a recommendation (becausue it's a 'totally fine' VR indie game) but qualify it as a 'not really'.

The #1 top complaint I have about the game itself is PLEASE TURN OFF THE FLOOR GRID. IIRC this is a simple check-box in the floor script (in Unity editor) to have the grid only show when there is a teleporter cursor active on them, and it would enormously improve the overall look and feel of the game.

Uninteresting, janky, and tedious.
Let's just say there's a reason it's almost always on sale for 90% off.

Also, let's just say a lot of those positive reviews sure look suspicious.

I got this game from a friend who had a key for it but didn't own a VR headset, and by giving it to me he dodged a bullet because this by far the worst VR game I've ever played so far. It is extremely underbaked and totally wastes it's interesting concept.

There's problems right from the start as the game as the game doesn't boot up immediately; it has the standard Unity settings window which will only appear on your desktop forcing you to either take off your headset or go into SteamVR's virtual desktop just to start the actual game. Once it boots up the language select is right in your face and you can't see all the flags without stepping back a bit.

The game starts with a very clunky tutorial that takes place in a dark room where you can't even see your controller properly. The thing you have to interact with to progress the tutorial is easy to miss and as a result I messed up the starting room a lot on my first time playing just trying to figure out what to do, so I had to restart the game. The tutorial is not designed for non-Vive controllers as well and your "hands" are always styled like the Vive controllers. It does at least overlay a silhouette of your non-Vive controller to show you button inputs.

As for the game itself? Imagine a bad flash point and click game in VR. That's pretty much it. There's only one puzzle in the game that's more than just "find an item and put it in it's marked location" or "find a number and input it in it's marked location". What about the time manipulation mechanics you ask? They're not used by the game at all. No puzzles make use of it and the only time mechanic you'd ever need to use is the rewind, because there's a section where you have to throw a bunch of objects at silhouettes of themselves and rewinding is the only way to get them back if you missed. If you're good at throwing stuff in VR, you can beat the game without ever using the time manipulation outside of the tutorial.

The other main mechanic (which actually DOES get some use, shocker) is swapping between the past and present version of the house you're in. It's not used for much outside of bringing items to and from the different eras and getting into rooms which are locked in one era but not the other. Twice in the game you will run into the titular Timelock (announced by a voice shouting "TIMELOCK!" rather than anything interesting), which I think is supposed to be some kind of paradox situation but it's very hard to tell thanks to the poor translation of your mission control's dialogue.

The Timelock itself is just a void area made up of random objects, which I wouldn't be surprised if they came from the Unity asset store (such as a billboard with "PLACE YOUR PICTURE HERE" written on it) and untextured cubes. In it you have to fight flying enemies that look like they came from a bad Game Builder Garage game. They make no sounds at all and as a result have no audio feedback for their position and the shots they fire. Don't worry though! They cannot harm you in any way at all. This game has no failstate whatsoever. To "fight" them, you use a longbow that feels EXACTLY the same as the longbow in The Lab, down to the sounds. Since that was made in Unity (outside of Robot Repair) I wouldn't be surprised if it was a flat-out stolen asset from The Lab. This longbow is also never used for puzzles at all, outside of one target you have to hit to proceed which is more of a tutorial.

The game as a whole is very unpolished. It's easy to grab objects when they're supposed to be behind walls or place them out of bounds, and they'll often launch themselves at the slightest movement. There's nothing to stop you from poking your head inside walls either. You can't rotate or reset your orientation at all, so you'll often have troubling doing stuff if your headset's tracking only comes from one direction. There's also a floor grid that cannot be disabled and seems to try and render in front of everything. (why it isn't just visible when you're moving like in SteamVR Home is beyond me) When I got to the final "boss" for some reason the game wouldn't let me equip the longbow, softlocking the game. I had to restart the whole thing because the game has no saving at all.

What happens when you "beat" the game? All it does is lock you in a single room with a message that says (I'm paraphrasing here) "Thanks for playing episode 1! Stay tuned for more episodes!". The game released in 2018 and hasn't had a single update since. This whole game feels like a scam. The store page makes no mention of this being a "part one" of something. The "fully intractable environment" means nothing other than being able to pick up every prop. (this ain't HL:A) The logo artwork on the store doesn't resemble anything that appears in the game. There's no semblance of a consistent artstyle throughout the game (the mission control in particular looks like some kind of furry creature that's totally out of place) that makes me suspect this is cobbled together from Unity asset store assets. The game costs £9.99 but is also included in a bundle that's always discounted at 99%, almost as if to prey on people looking for sales or with leftover Steam credit.

In conclusion? This game is a total waste of your time and money. It doesn't use it's central concept in any way and is incredibly slapped-together. If you know what you're doing, you can beat this in less than 10 minutes. The only reason I can think of this game having a "mostly positive" rating is because of alt accounts or paid bots; most reviews just have a basic description of the game rather than any actual praising/critiques and one review is almost the exact same as another, word-for-word. This game is a prime example of Steam shovelware and isn't worth the £0.20 you can get it for in a bundle.

Warning: Asset Flip![en.wikipedia.org]
Time Lock VR 1 is a Digital Homicide style asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unity asset store packs, dumped them all in a blender, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers.

Two notable criteria for what makes an asset flip instead of legitimate use of stock assets are whether those assets comprise the majority of the game, and whether the "developer" properly credited the people who created most of the assets in the game. This game fails both of those tests. The "developers" here didn't credit any of the artists and real, actual game developers who created the assets here, so this is plagiarism, as well as cash grab shovelware.

In this case, the asset flipper took a bunch of Unity assets, dropped them onto a basic FPS/VR/Adventure game template to make some kind of "escape room" (that barely works), and are trying to cash in by putting fake reviews on shovelware. It has no value or merit as a real game.

Whale Rock Games have a known history of trying to scam people into paying them money for someone else's work, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. One example of Whale Rock Games doing this is PolyClassic: Wild, which is really the "POLYGON - Western Pack[www.unrealengine.com]" asset, written by the actual developers, Synty Studios.

As always with lazy asset flips like this, there's no product with any value for gamers, if you buy this, you're wasting your money on an insincerely made minimum viable product.

This seems to have been made a VR exclusive to prevent any comparison with non-VR 3D games, a comparison that this game would fail very badly at. Developers must learn that while VR is great, if the only thing that makes the game great is the VR, then the game isn't great at all.

You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality game this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.

Warning: Review Manipulation![www.forbes.com]

This game features a large number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian or broken English, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this game should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Time Lock VR 1 has the almost scam-like price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Monster Hunter World", "Mirror's Edge" or "Ghostrunner". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

In the early days of commercial VR, back in 2017, someone made a 30-minute puzzle game about finding a few hidden objects and time travelling at will between two different versions of the same area. He put it on sale for the outrageous price of $8.99.

I bought Timelock VR for an outrageous price, though my price was literally 5¢ because I bought it as part of the WRG bundle at -96% off. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/7396/WRG_bundle/

2017 was also a time when developers sometimes developed for one headset or another, and in this case Timelock VR was made for the HTC Vive and its Vive Wands. I played with an Oculus Rift and the controls worked fine once I figured out how to do it.

The key to playing this with an Oculus Touch kit is to recognize that the model of Vive wands you hold in-game have a radial display of icons on each controller. With a Vive wand you would press the trackpad in the direction of the icons to activate those functions. Oculus Touch has thumbsticks in place of trackpads, but the idea is the same. Angle the thumbstick in the appropriate direction (e.g., Up for the bow) and press the thumbstick down until it clicks. Simple.

The game has teleport only, but I think that's fine for this game. The biggest controls problem I had was the lack of artificial rotation. Physically moving is mandatory, which meant I had problems with tracking when my body blocked the controllers.

I had to stop playing midway through my first session of the game. When I came back to it, I was right back at the beginning of the game. No worries, since I knew where to find the hidden objects and was able to get back to where I'd left off in about five minutes.

The game is extremely short and barebones. I suppose that's why there's no save system. There is no challenge other than it took me a while to find the last key, which was more sneakily hidden than any of the other objects.

The unique thing about this game is the fact it has bow combat, but there are ten enemies in the entire game and none of them do anything threatening. They don't even have sound effects! The time pausing and rewinding features are also potentially interesting, but go completely unused. It's almost as if the game is incomplete or something...

The game ends with a message congratulating me on completing the first episode of Timelock VR and promises to let me know "when the new missions be available [sic]."

I don't think there will ever be new missions. That's fine by me.

"TimeLock VR is an Escape the Room with Action elements where you take control over the time!"

The above is true but you are not stuck in one room and this game does have free roaming and shooting. The puzzle aspect is implemented but probably not too hard for most people. A good mix of action (shooter), puzzle and adventure with a slight story thrown in there too. Because of the time travel aspect and mix of genre the graphics vary from level to level. Overall, they are good and clear. Time travel is used to find items and clues. For $4.99 it is a great game to have in the library. The newer big games might take most of our time but let's not forget our Indie devs who are trying to give us unique experiences as well. Support this title. My rating 8/10 for the creativity of the title.

Short partial video play here:

https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQL-YVxf6o&feature=share

Not work on quest 2

At the moment of writing this review (June 2018) the store page STILL indicates this game is fully compatible with Oculus which, as soon as you start the game you'll notice it obviously isn't.

DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY!