I’ve been playing video games for some time now – I remember booting up Reader Rabbit when I was six years old thinking "today’s gonna be a good day." Two burnt out, overclocked processors, and more than a half dozen games I could name my firstborn after (Chrono Arrue? No?), and I’ve come to realize a few things about video games.
Other than being able to spell impeccably now, playing video games for so long has made me realize that a game doesn’t have to be groundbreaking to be fun. That’s sort of like how Timeless: The Lost Castle is, enjoyable in a way you’ve probably seen before in other casual games.
Quite often, I hear people complain about how a game isn’t innovative enough, or how it doesn’t push the envelope, as if the reason you sit down to play is specifically to bear witness to the development of gaming as an art form.
It’s a ridiculous statement, people play games to escape and have fun. For those reasons, this relatively generic adventure into the middle of a magical coup is an entertaining way to burn a night’s worth of time.
The gameplay is surprisingly tricky; the designers definitely pulled out all the stops when they came up with some of these challenges. It’s nothing that’s going to have you pulling your hair out, but if you like quirky puzzles, you should get a kick out of some of the ones they’ve come up with.
Timeless: The Lost Castle is somewhat interesting in that there aren’t really a whole lot of HOS segments compared to the other puzzles you have to do. Most of the legwork is in trying to scramble up the pieces you need to get to the puzzles, and usually the HOS are just sort of a step to getting to the more interesting puzzles.
The graphics are quite good, even when you consider how strong most casual games are in that area. Combined with the sound effects, they really set a fanciful mood for playing through this particular adventure, although the background music can be a little underwhelming at times.
There are plenty of details in all the scenes that I thought were great, and the FMV sequences were fairly well done.
Timeless isn’t perfect, however, and it did have me rolling my eyes a few times. It’s a short game, and if you’re bored and/or determined, you could definitely polish it off in a single evening. I have more of an issue with the plot, which starts out extremely awkwardly. See that far-from-friendly-looking ghostly apparition of a wizard in the picture above, the glowing crimson one? Yeah, that’s who you’re helping.
Apparently, and this isn’t really a spoiler, just the intro to the story, really, this guy is haunting your dreams and asking you to help him save someone. So you immediately drop everything you’re doing and fly to Europe to meet him. Really?? This man’s spirit is the color of an exit sign, that doesn’t strike you as a warning sign? I wouldn’t follow him down a well-lit alleyway, but no, the main character gets on the flight. About two minutes later, the wizard is annihilating passengers for no obvious reason, and you continue to work with this man. I don’t get it.
In fairness, the story does get better after that – you have to save a little girl, there’s a whole thing with a wizard order; it’s not honestly that bad of a plot line, I just couldn’t really get too involved after the intro because it struck me as so forced. So I just stayed for the puzzles, which were worth it.
Anyway, Timeless: The Lost Castle is an enjoyable little game that doesn’t overachieve, but doesn’t really come up too short either.