Sometimes I have a bad habit of starting games and then getting distracted and setting them aside halfway through or just before the finale. This year I hope to clear out some of that backlog of unfinished video games. As I complete them I’ll write up a quick review for those of you who might be interested.

Timespinner is a short game in the Metroidvania genre. This genre is a mash up of classic Metroid and Castlevania games that normally involves an interconnected map that has parts blocked off until you discover a necessary ability to progress. For example, you might need a keycard to open a door or an ability to break a boulder that is in your way.

I was intrigued by this game because it has excellent online reviews and is relatively short (less than 10 hours to complete) and I bought it when it was on sale some time ago. I also love the theme of time travel and was interested in how it would fit into the gameplay and story. The graphics and effects are very well done for a 2D side scroller.

In the game you play Lunais, a time messenger who has been trained to jump through time to warn her tribe of an impending attack by a fascist space regime. When messengers do this there is a break in time and they are written out of it and have to reintegrate into the community upon their return. Unfortunately as the fascists invade, you jump a little too late and the time machine is broken causing you to be sent willy nilly into the future.

Before I go into some plot spoilers I want to say that I did enjoy this game and would generally recommend it with a couple of caveats. I liked how you can repeatedly beat most enemies to find unique items and how quickly you can travel around the game world after finding a few power ups. You generally felt powerful as a character and the game was overall fun to play. Although the plot seems generic I unfortunately would have to say that Timespinner wouldn’t be appropriate for children due to some side content that I’ll talk about momentarily.

A few basic gripes include the fact that the plot doesn’t fully explore the silliness of time travel which was a bummer for me as I enjoy the mystery and havoc this power would obviously create. In fact, the first power you get is the ability to stop time (it is also one of three things you can improve regularly as the game progresses), but this power is almost irrelevant for most of the game and never really changes except for how long it can stay active. Lunais can also hold two weapons at a time, alternating her attacks between them, but I found this to be an underdeveloped idea and I almost always had just a single weapon equipped in both slots.

Continuing with tiny complaints. Some equipment gives added powers like preventing poison, but unless the description specifically pointed these things out, there wasn’t an easy way to figure out what those powers might be. For this reason I just used the most powerful items I had except for one boss where I used the aforementioned poison nullifier. A great example of this is a fairy familiar (a familiar is a creature which follows you around and helps your character) which supposedly heals you, but when I used the darn thing it generally just attacked enemies like all the other familiars did. There are a bunch of different ways you could set up your character but I never felt like it was worth my time to play with these systems since most enemies died almost immediately.

If you are interested in the game based on the above, go buy and play it before continuing reading this post. The game is available for any gaming system (other than your phone) and regularly goes on sale for $4.99 which it is definitely worth. Don’t pay the regular price of $19.99 as it is too short to justify that cost.

Spoilers: A big part of the plot is that because the time machine is broken, you inadvertently jump between current times and 1000 years in the past as you try to make changes which will permanently save your tribe. If you make the correct choices as you play through, you will cause an unfixable rift in time-space and a cat god of time will try to murder you. Of course you fight back and win, thus becoming the new time god. On the positive side, the game offers four endings and a new game +. You can see three of the endings in a single playthrough and then restart in new game + keeping almost all of your abilities and items, zooming to the final ending in about an hour while absolutely devastating every monster in the game.

Why did I say this game isn’t for children? Because the developers decided that almost all the other characters would spend most of their time being unabashedly horny for each other and you. I found it disjarring that the characters are nonchalant about having a time traveler in their midst who is bringing future technology to the past and fighting god demons and are instead preoccupied with how their colleagues felt about them coming out as transexual or how all the soldiers in a platoon have dated each other. I don’t have any problem with that content but it felt like it was forced into a game that had plenty of other topics that would have been more appropriate for the cast of characters to focus on.

A sequel is in development and, depending on its length, I’ll be waiting for it to come out and be available for $5 – $10 before I buy and play it. If you are interested in the Metroidvania genre, but not this game, tell me in the comments and I can give you some amazing game recommendations as it is one of my very favorite types of games.