TimeMelters (Third-Person Dark Fantasy Witch Strategy)
Oooo here’s an interesting one yay. All I knew was we got an indie team with some sort of witch game. Cool, because this has been a witch kind of past month. We got Acid Witch review dropped last week, we got the new Atomic Witch dropping soon (review coming this week), and now we got some witch shit in video game form. Last witch game I can remember reviewing was the sleeper hit Witch Hunt, but TimeMelters puts you in control of the witch(es) themselves instead of against them and man does it still burn. Let’s set this on fire yo.
You are witchhater-turned-witchgirl Teagan, who’s possessed by the ghost of an executed witch in the middle of the chaos wrought by the forces of darkness. From there you’re taken through an intricate story featuring a unique mechanic for what is, in essence, a hybrid-RPG dark fantasy strategy game. Each primary battle is designed as a puzzle, where perfecting various powers allows you to complete certain goals through set parameters, though there is plenty of room to exploit and experiment. What’s unique is the control of time itself, where you can reverse the flow and create duplicates of Teagan to simultaneously act within the past and future. This particular feature has you create duplicates of yourself, called “echoes,” formed via time reversal and which act out your choices exactly as you performed them in the past. This requires you to think ahead and in the past to progress. And it’s not easy, either. Though you can choose to focus more on story or combat, or a combination of both, each new battle brings more challenges and new skills, which slowly come together and can be upgraded. Considering this is a team of only 3 devs, who are extremely responsive on Discord and Steam btw, TimeMelters is impressive. It’s rare you see a new mechanic brought into a strategy game, especially with such detailed lore never serving as an afterthought. I would have preferred a more grim look to the world and creatures, but that’s largely personal taste and nothing you’ll likely notice.
Written by Stanley, Devourer of Souls
TimeMelters
Autoexec Games (developer, publisher)
4.5 / 5
