In Timemelters, time is like a special shoelace. It bends and twists in all sorts of amazing ways. What you do in one part of the time lace can have unexpected effects on the other parts. There are loops, but also knots, snarls, and tangles. And sometimes, there are beautiful bows.
Listen up. Just yesterday – yesterday in the real world – I was running up a snowy hill – this part wasn’t in the real world – and I saw a bunch of enemies approaching my friend who had no defences. If my friend died, it would be game over. I was out of range and mana, but I was also close enough to attract the enemies’ attention, and they started to come at me. I was stumped and my hands left the keyboard: I almost gave up. And then I watched in disbelief as someone completely new rushed in and quickly zapped all the enemies dead. I blinked. My friend who had no defences survived. I, who was out of mana, survived. And the person who had come to our aid was…me? Me from a few minutes ago. Welcome to Timemelters.
Fittingly for this complex game set in time, let’s start by going back a bit. Not to the 16th century where Timemelters is set in a Scotland filled with witch trials and supernatural paranoia, but to Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves, a truly strange and wonderful strategy-action hybrid from 2013. Sang-Froid is a masterpiece in my eyes, and it’s so strange that it’s even better. You play as a lumberjack whose sister, I think, is being targeted by the devil. Every night the devil sends wolves to attack your farm, so you set traps, build defences, and also run around in real-time smacking those beasts with an axe. During the day, you work chopping lumber to earn money to upgrade your traps and defences for the night ahead.
TimeMelters Trailer
It’s magical, truly magical. It’s a tactics game – with the wolves heading towards the centre of your farm and the expanding ring of traps you lay down, it’s almost like a tower defence game. But it’s also a real-time action game because once those wolves appear, you’re out there in the snow with them, listening for them, leading them with your shouts and scent to the spots where you can take them out. It’s a game about being stretched thin and constantly exhausted. And it’s exhilarating.
And Timemelters is an almost-sequel. It has some of the same developers who have formed a new studio, and it has many of the same ideas, but they’ve evolved and transformed. 19th century Quebec has become olde Scotland in the grip of witches and spirits. The farm has given way to various maps as you rush back and forth between small towns, farms, and citadels. The wolves have been replaced with a range of otherworldly monsters – like pawns that come in groups, like plagues that are huge pig-like beasts that need to be shot from behind – and you’re no longer a lumberjack. You’re a witch who controls both time and space – to a certain extent.
I first saw videos for Timemelters when it was still called Wicca, and it remains one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever witnessed. Start on a strategic view of a map with a special object to protect in the centre and lots of red lines converging – the paths the enemies will take towards the object. So far, so Sang-Froid. But then you jump into the action as a witch and you have much more than an axe now. You can attack groups of enemies and then stop, rewind time, and fight alongside your echo from earlier. Double, triple, quadruple the firepower. You can charm stones to create walls that affect the paths of your advancing enemies, guiding them, bunching them up. You can charm trees that turn into huge spindly towers, killing anything that walks beneath their branches, giving you targets to direct your enemies towards. You can place a variety of spells that will bind the bad guys to the ground with knots, or unleash a fire demon on them and kite them while it weakens them, or summon a huge death mirrorball. Or you can activate a bunch of stone circles on the map, allowing you to quickly travel between them, like crumpling space into a paper ball just as your echoes have already crumpled time.
It was actually this last element that really blew me away, and it continues to amaze me every time I play Timemelters. The stone circles are placed in specific spots on the map and you need to cast a spell to activate them. Once you do, you enter a portal system that allows you to travel between these spots quite quickly. But importantly, it’s not instantaneous. You still spend time travelling in the white void between each stone portal. Time when bad things can happen in the field, but also time you can use. In one game last week, I was low on the mana that controlled my basic attack and I had a huge group of enemies to deal with. What I did was a bit cowardly but also felt like a cheat. I would shoot until I ran out of mana and then duck into the portal while I recharged, knowing my enemies couldn’t follow. Then I’d rush out and blast them again once they’d lost interest and were wandering off. And repeat.
Repeat. Timemelters today is exactly the game Wicca promised to be, but it’s had a lot of development time and it’s not as overwhelming as it sounds. Enemies and skills are introduced gradually and carefully. At first, all you need to know is that you’re a witch with powerful spells but only have 1 hit point – you’ll die the first time you take damage. Then you learn about globes of mana you can collect from defeated foes to power up special moves like charmed trees and stones, and it might prompt you to attack your foes in a specific sequence. Then you learn about creating echoes and what it does to the enemies you face. You learn how, on a second loop, when you’ve already laid down an echo of yourself, the game will mark enemies that are still alive but will be killed by your echo soon. You learn about time distortion, which is when, in the current loop, you change the reality of an echo from a past loop, killing enemies they were supposed to kill or unleashing new enemies that will kill the echo before it finishes its original loop. Then you learn about protecting fragile NPCs, and then you learn…
Onward. By the middle of the game, I was incredibly powerful. I had not one but two main attacks, each powered in different ways, and two different sets of spells. I could create echoes and rush through non-Euclidean Pac-Man space or whatever it is in the stone circles, or I could turn into a wolf temporarily to dash past foes and get the drop on those that could only be killed from behind.
But crucially, the game had also evolved, taking the simple tower defence setup and creating escort missions, horde modes, and bosses. One particularly memorable level had me protecting an ally on one side of a river while enemies attacked on the other – and there was no way to cross the river directly to engage. Another had a boss that split into four parts, each of which had to be killed at the same time, so I had to use my echoes to reach the four parts of the boss scattered around a huge map, but I also had to consider the time of flight and arrival to synchronise four different attacks in a world where I had already tangled space and time so much that I’d need a penknife to separate them again.
Many games can be complex, of course. And various parts of Timemelters are things I’ve seen before. Creating echoes is a neat idea you can also find in games like Time Rifters and Super Time Force. But a couple of elements come together in Timemelters to make it truly special to me. Its parts are lovely, but it’s always more than the sum of its parts.
One of these elements is the maps. They are both beautiful chunks of Highland nature and intricate mazes full of possibilities. Enemies can be rerouted, tricked, and led astray, but you can also easily get lost and only an earlier version of yourself who you had forgotten about can come to your aid. (It’s beautiful in its own way too. Timemelters is an interesting-looking game – the characters have the pale, shadowed faces of Edward Hopper characters – but its feel for nature is stunning. Nature here is like bracken parting as you push through. It’s the crunch of snow under your feet. It’s night with the fire of a burning village sending sparks through the trees as you approach. The people who made this have spent a lot of time in the solitude around trees.)
Another element that makes it all work is that Timemelters knows what it is and has a very clear sense of itself. It’s strategy, tactics, and real-time action, it’s planning and intense execution. But step back and it’s also just puzzles and combat. Each map presents a puzzle to be solved and combat to be handled to solve the puzzle. It’s encounters, but also your choice of how, when, and where to engage, and with how many versions of yourself. The game understands all this to the extent that it grades each level with both a puzzle and combat difficulty setting, and because the game understands what it’s about, so will you. And so you will solve the puzzle, fight the combat, and then come back to see if you can do it differently too. And another different way?
