Timeloop Sink Again Beach is a game with interesting mechanics that falls short in a few areas. Before putting together this review I played through the title multiple times, achieved each and every achievement and even made a 100% completion walkthrough guide. At this point I think I'm ready to give it my seal of approval with a few forewarnings. This review is available on video here; https://youtu.be/yxtSnmftB-I?si=Kp-x-ciUK19kE8Du Timeloop Sink Again Beach self describes as an unusual gaming experience of non-linear first person adventure. It released November 16th, 2022 by FangsLab and Flatcoon. I'd say its most similar to a point and click adventure game, like Monkey Island, but it occupies a first person viewpoint and has a unique time travel gameplay mechanic. The main aspect of gameplay that really makes Timeloop interesting is the timeloop itself. In order to solve the puzzles you must time travel to various points of the day as the NPCs all have their own schedules. Each time travel will create a duplicate of yourself running around the island within the same timeframe. Running into the copies of your past, present and future selves will end up breaking the space time continuum thus giving a game over. This means that the longer you take to solve the puzzles, the more time travels you use, the potential difficulty rises. Aside from this temporal action the rest of the gameplay outside of conversations with characters is pretty much more of a walking sim or point and click adventure. You walk around the island retrieving the correct items to bring to the correct person at the correct time. This leads into probably the biggest problem that can potentially present itself ingame - continuity problems. It is possible to talk with and complete quest steps outside of an intended order that makes absolute sense for the end user. While not incredibly egregious I did encounter this at a couple points. Outside of this my only gripe with the gameplay was that I almost immediately ran into invisible walls on my first playthrough. The plot revolves around the player character Jack who is visiting Death Island in order to dump his friend Donald's ashes. It has a small but colorful cast of characters such as a monk, a voodoo bandit, a graverobbing archaeologist, an evil witchdoctor and some other pirate types. Most conversation is chock full of easter eggs referential to pop culture. Harry Potter, Monkey Island, The Big Lebowski just to name a few. Depending on your tolerance for this sort of constant low brow media citation you'll find this either entertaining or outright gaudy. In terms of tolerance to certain aspects, this game does also include some LONG cutscenes. Upon first playing I was a bit taken aback by just how long some of them felt - but after further review I realize this is likely intentional game design as it is possible to run into your past-present-future selves mid dialogue as a means to trigger game over. Also might be worth noting sometimes in these exchanges animations can get a bit buggy. Besides some janky animations the graphics look pretty decent. I especially liked hanging around the environments and taking in the landscapes. On the otherhand the Isle of Death seems to be home to some odd characters. Real pretty land, real ugly dudes, barely clothed and smokin' hot babes. While nothing in this game is explicit by any means I could definitely see the sensibilities of some to consider this sort of character design to be a bit over the top. As per User Interface I would of really liked the option to resize it. As it stands the UI and text is VERY small and I can see this being an issue for those with faulty eyes - by this I mean me. I have a faulty eye. I had to squint. The weakest aspect of this game is in its audio department. Despite boasting its voice work as professional there were points where I wasn't sure if they were even real. I felt suspect about some of them them enough to actually write in my review notes while playing "AI VOICES QUESTOIN MARK." After game completion and looking at the credits it seems that they are NOT computer generated. Perhaps this is a disconnect between the games native language and me playing the English localization? What's worse than the hit or miss voice work is the soundtrack seems to be comprised of royalty free tunes. This in and of itself isn't the end of the world but it felt a bit immersion breaking considering how popular some of the royalty free soundtracks chosen actually seem to be. Of course this varies by experience but personally I hear some of these tracks on a pretty regular basis as background music in youtube videos. Overall I recommend getting this one while it is on sale. To me the unique gameplay mechanic was interesting enough to make up for the negatives I have with the gaming experience. It's a bit rough around the edges and relatively short but will ultimately remain a memorable gaming experience.
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