The latest from Edmund McMillen and Alex, Time Fcuk is another platformer noir like the incidentally titled Edmund and a whole rash of other surrealistic 2d bastard children that Miyamoto left to drown in the pacific. The game is, surprisingly, not about time or fucking, but about shifting between two planes to solve puzzles. This mechanic comes loaded with a highly subdued character design, subdued for McMillen's standards, the craziest you get here is a simply drawn circular head that takes cyanide and explodes, or a second circle demarcating a siamese twin.
The music, muted colors and textual harassment of your future self from the next room all wear on an existential mist, like No Exit meets Sokoban. The aesthetic is executed well enough that its worth ten minutes just to absorb, even though the rhetorical quip "is there something to this or is it just weird for weird's sake?" pretty well encapsulates the double irony sundae and if that's not your dessert of choice, you probably won't be so into it. The puzzle solving is fairly interesting but seems to serve the underlying philosophical poking of "what does it all mean" by being pre-emptively banal. Kind of like the last part of Metal Gear Solid 2 wrapped in block manipulation challenges and crunched down to a Flash game in a manner similar to the way cars get compacted into scrap.
User-created content
I rather like the level editor and rudimentary community. You can rate other people's levels by fun factor and difficulty, and you can also play a "random campaign" assembled from levels in increasing order of difficulty. More games should do that sort of thing.
Shift?
There are four versions of a VERY similar game on Kongregate entitled "Shift".
Definitely a neat concept and fun to play to boot.
Yeah but Shift doesn´t have
Yeah but Shift doesn´t have this games´ dripping begging aesthetic.
In the future we will all be robots user generating procedural content in a big orgy call the Multilarity. Mark it dude.
Shift
Shift is also on Newgrounds. (I suspect it showed up on Newgrounds first, but I don't have any real evidence for that.)
Quite a Game
I thought this one is a lot more creative with mechanics than Shift. The puzzles are good, both of the endings are fairly clever. I do wish that the time traveling messages fit into the actual puzzles a bit more, though, that bit is not very well connected to the gameplay.