However, the game is strongly rooted in the Japanese adventure tradition, which favors a more streamlined approach than most Western players are accustomed to. Shadow of Memories would be considered as an adventure game, at least insofar that there are no action elements and you’re just supposed to solve problems using your head. There is, however, no way of knowing if Lebensbaum is supposed to consist of more than just the rather small Old City, since the city wall is completely intact and closed, and the entire plot unfolds inside of them, giving you neither reason nor opportunity to leave. It’s much less of an accurate replica in other parts, though. Its market place with the city hall, and especially the Plönlein, one of the most famous road partings in the world, are more than just hinted at. In fact, the developers’ inspiration can be clearly traced back to Rothenburg ob der Tauber. While Shadow of Memories’ story and characters are already heavily inspired by Goethe’s works, Lebensbaum (literally “Life Tree”, although there is a real plant with the botanic name Arbor Vitae), the town where it takes place, is depicted as a typical German Old Towne. If they were evil and mean, they could be called the Tannens of Shadow of Memories. In every period Eike comes into contact with this lineage of visual artists, all of them looking alike.
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Therefore, he heads on to a journey through four time periods, going as far back as 1580, to change his eternal fate.Ī famous painter, a photographer and a movie director. After avoiding the immediate threat through simple means several times, like gathering a crowd so that the killer can’t possibly strike unseen, he soon realizes that there’s a major force after his life, and he seems to be destined to die. However, instead of resting in peace for eternity, Eike finds himself in a surreal room, summoned by a strange androgyne voice, who grants him the opportunity to go back in time to prevent his untimely demise. After a dozing off while having a cup of coffee, your protagonist, Eike Kusch, gets assaulted immediately as soon as he leaves the cafe, knowing neither who killed him nor why. The story of Shadow of Memories opens with a murder – your own. Day of the Tentacle should stay the lonely king of time travel in games for a whole eight years, until Konami released Shadow of Memories for the PlayStation 2 in 2001, which became finally a worthy queen on its side. The main drive around most of the puzzles was to change something in the past, so that problems would be solved in the present or future.
This kind of gameplay device was (somewhat) recently refined by the downloadable adventure/platformer Braid.īy far the most consequential example of gameplay-relevant actual time travel for a long time was delivered by Lucasarts’ comedy adventure Maniac Mansion: Day of The Tentacle, whose three protagonists are stuck in separate timelines, and can only interact by flushing objects through the time travel toilet (yeah, you read that right). Other than the original, whose only relation with time was to limit your adventure to one hour, the Prince here holds the Dagger of Time, which gives him the power to slow down the flow of time, or actually rewind it a few seconds to undo his mistakes. Another approach is taken by Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Chrono Trigger, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Onimusha 3 all follow the basic concept of manipulating persons or objects in the past to achieve your goals in the present. Some RPG or adventure games have experimented with time causalities, where your actions in one time period aid to your advancement in the future. However, most of these games share one common characteristic: time travel is merely used as a plot device, while games that incorporate the flow of time into their gameplay are rather few and far between in comparison.
We’ve prevented the alien invaders from destroying Earth as the Duke himself in Duke Nukem Zero Hour – not without giving his past self a call through the centuries – snatched time crystals from the Time Splitters, hunted Dinosaurs together with the Native American Turok, and much, much more.
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So it hardly comes as a surprise that video gaming, too, is full of time travel stories. Be it simple visits as a mere spectator without influence, like Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, the “visitor from the past”, like the British medieval wizard Catweazle, or elaborate cause-effect constructs about the manipulation of the flow of time like the Back to the Future trilogy – people have always obsessed over the idea of changing one’s past, killing Hitler, or getting an outlook on the future. Time travel stories hold an universal appeal to mankind.
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Japanese PS2 Cover Time Travel in Video Games
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