Silverhand
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I run a discord server called Autumn’s Rise, it’s a chill and welcoming place to hang out and discuss games/movies/etc. Anyone’s welcome to join! https://discord.gg/7J7QRDVg7D
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GOTY '23
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Time Bandit stands out as one of the more unique experiences I've had with a game. The central mechanic of the game is interactions taking real world time to complete. You work in a warehouse in a desolate, company-owned town, and are tasked with moving boxes around to collect time crystals. This is represented by sokoban-type puzzles. The equipment you need to use to complete your work will take at least 30 minutes to complete an action, sometimes longer, but you can leave it to work even with the game closed. This might sound like a gimmick, and it did seem that way to me at first, but the game does a great job of fully exploring this concept.
As far as the moment-to-moment gameplay, I mentioned the sokoban puzzles previously. These aren't anything especially complex, but they do require a good bit of thought as you have to plan out your moves in advance. These also introduce other elements with different types of equipment and obstacles. I never found the puzzles too difficult, but they were interesting enough to be satisfying. There are other elements to the game as well, and it's quite an interesting mix of genres. There's a management element, you earn money through your work but you're required to provide your own equipment beyond what you get at the start. You can buy more stuff at the town's general store, but you also have to balance this with saving money for trips to the hospital and buying gas to power the equipment you already have. Early on you also learn of a secret entrance to the warehouse and can sneak in while you're not on the clock, introducing a stealth element. You can get some extra work done, or more importantly steal from the company, but if you get caught you'll be sent to jail for trespassing.
I haven't really talked much about the story up to this point, and while you've probably realized that the company in the game sounds pretty evil, you might expect it to not address that on a deeper level. Time Bandit gets into some very political themes, and while it's a bit heavy-handed in some of the ways it talks about them, it addresses stuff I haven't seen any other games really talk about sincerely and tries to educate the player on real political ideas. The story is told through interacting with just a handful of characters. There's your boss at work, a coworker, a member of the resistance movement, and the local store owner. While you do sometimes talk to them in person, most conversations are done over radio. Sometimes they'll reach out to you with something to talk about, but you can also contact any of them at any point in the game and they'll have different things to say depending on the context of what you're doing. I won't spoil more of the details than I already have, but it does stand out as very different among the medium of games and uses it pretty effectively.