Time Travel

It isn't often that we review classic games, but Nick Fortugno's, experience inspired me to give Chrono Trigger a replay. I'm glad I did, because I was one of those cliche'd individuals that this game made an impression on, and on an adult replay I've gained a lot of perspective on mastery of craft. CT is perhaps the genre king of Japanese Role-playing Games (the queen was not so much a game as a moment: Celes' attempted suicide in Final Fantasy VI). It gains this title for three reasons: first it capture the supreme essence of jRPG aesthetics with Akira Toriyama's character designs combined with Square's then budding sense of interface polish, secondly its narrative made use of archtypes in a way that perhaps seems cliche at first (as Nick pointed out skeptically when starting the game) but then deepens to a psychodrama of cuasation that would make Carl Jung want to write an analysis, and three it took the trite grind of jRPG combat and made it interesting through a handful of simple variations that in combination yield distinct boss fights all the way to the Lavos Core.

Chronotron is at its heart a conventional puzzle-platformer; your little guy appears on the screen along with his Tardis, and somewhere else on the screen is a "time machine" part you need to retrieve and return to your Tardis. Arrow keys to move (up-arrow to jump), with the occasional crate to pick up and move, buttons to stand or put crates on, and so forth. We've seen this before.

What we haven't seen before, is the "time travel" effect. That is, lots of people have been experimenting with time travel in one form or another in indie games recently, perhaps inspired by Braid, but Chronotron uses the motif in a straight-forward way that works very well in a platform-puzzler context. By returning to your Tardis and pressing the space bar, you hop in, and then reappear--and so does your previous self, who goes off and performs whatever actions you performed the last time you left the Tardis.

Time travel would seem to be a fairly intractable subject for a game. After all, paradoxes are a major issue, and the sheer variety of potential outcomes are a challenge, at least if you posit that changing the time stream is at all feasible (and if you don't, then time travel is nothing more than historical tourism). That's one reason that Chrononauts is such a clever design; it tackles the problem head-on, producing something quite satisfying (and even instructional for younger players without much knowledge of history) with what is, when you come down to it, a remarkably simple and quite clever system.