Quick Critique: Timespinner (Patreon)

Timespinner is shamelessly on the nose about its influence from Symphony of the Night. It even tips its hand very early about its inverse castle and has an Order of Ecclesia-style quest and weapon system. It may not win any awards for originality, but at least it cribbing from some of the best games ever made. It's just sooo a wannabe Symphony of the Night. The UI and menus, Familiars, Relics, items, enemy functions, and even some decorations and room layouts are cribbed directly from the source.

Timespinner's main addition is a time travel story, which I also happen to be a fan of. However, it doesn't lean into the time travel enough. Early in the game, you burn down some vines in the past so 1,000 years from now, a pathway is open (those are A: some incredibly strong vines to last for 1,000 years, but also B: some incredibly crappy vines that in 1,000 years they couldn't even grow back 6 feet?). I was hoping for a lot of things like that, but those vines represent almost all of the non-narrative time travel shenanigans. You do some pretty major events to monkey with the past but the biggest thing that happens is that you open a gate. I want to avoid spoilers, but you seriously change things in the past but none of it is reflected in the future until you do the Big Three Things the story requires and then a gate opens. Any one of the things you do in the past should have major ramifications, but no, everything turns out exactly the same. The story starts to wear out its welcome towards the midpoint of the game. The collectible journals and character dialogue just seem like slight variations on each other, constantly pushing a “both sides are bad” narrative that doesn't really wrap up in a satisfying way. All of the endings are good in their own rights and avenues worth exploring, but there are some characters that seem to come out of nowhere and clash with the rest of the game, but their origins just get swept under the rug. The game's inclusiveness is also handled in this clunky fashion. Every single person in your camp has a revelation about their sexuality or gender identity they want to share with you. Some of them fall really flat due to the writing or art. The big payoffs to most quest lines are dialogue about the camp members, so you finish off a quest to reveal that a guy has a crush on another camp member! ...And? It turned out a character I thought was a woman due to her character portrait was actually a man so the reveal was supposed to be that the two characters were gay. The quest line only retroactively made sense after I finished the whole thing and only then did the two characters refer to each other as “he”s. I spent all that time farming random drops from enemies and THAT is all I get? You get up to your business, camp people, I'm here for upgrades. I'm not helping you out of the goodness of my heart, I want to level things up and see numbers get bigger!

On the plus side, there are so many things to level and see numbers get bigger. You can level your character, your Familiar, and weapons that fill up two melee slots, an active spell, and a passive ability! Unfortunately, there isn't much reason to change your weapons. The second active spell you get in the game is the best one and I stuck with the same passive almost the entire game, only changing it to use the passive that reveals breakable walls. Most of the melee attacks are just variations on each other and every new weapon starts off at level 1, so there isn't a good reason to swap away one you already have leveled up. For an exploration game, it's also stingy with the traversal upgrades. There aren't many and most of them are back loaded so the first half of the game doesn't change much. I had completed two of the three ending paths before I got the final upgrade. It's infuriating to see the credits roll with so much of the map unexplored.

Timespinner does a good job managing its combat. It's just complex enough but no more than that, so it doesn't wear out its welcome. The enemies do have weirdly high amounts of health. Boss fights plod along due to this. It usually isn't hard to figure out the boss's patterns but you have to do them over and over slowly chipping away at its healh, just trying to not get sloppy and take hits here and there. As long as you're doing your sidequests, your character will also have a lot of health, so you have to get really sloppy to be in any real danger. I perpetually felt underleveled due how long it took to kill everything, but at the same time, I didn't use a single healing item until I got to the final bosses.

There are a few plus-ups that are worth mentioning compared to SotN. You can put markers on the map like in Mirror of Fate, so you can make notes on places to backtrack to. But for some reason, you can't see those markers when fast traveling, so you need to check your map, then fast travel and look at that same map again. It has one of the speediest save processes and it's glorious. You just need to walk past a save spot and it automatically saves and heals you without any extra prompts. One weird thing to call out is that Start doesn't close the pause menu, it selects a thing inside the menu. Thank goodness for the confirmation on using items, because it's hard to break yourself of the habit of pressing Start to close a pause menu, so I'd just jam on it and accidentally enter menus and select items to chow down on.

Timespinner is a darn good representation of what went wrong with the indie game promise. It's a pretty good game, but it also kind of shamelessly rips off an existing game so that lessens what Timespinner does well. Rather than funding something new or original, Timespinner is probably going to get lost among shrugs of “it's another one of those”, which is a shame. Timespinner is a good “one of those” and maybe the only Kickstarted game I've left feeling good about. It's totally worth playing, it tells a good story, and I enjoyed my time with it, but it's hard to recommend to anybody outside of people that just need another hit of a Symphony of the Night fix.