You do know the “unity trick”, right? Namely, keep vsync checked out in the game options, but force it (and/or limit frames per second) on the GPU driver? In a lot of Unity games that lowers GPU temperatures very noticeably.
oh i didn’t know that. I’ll try it when I get back home!
Edit: tried it, and it does help the GPU quite a bit… But not the fan, for some reason.
This is so strange, the only game that I played that made this much venting noise (I can hear it with my headphones) was X-Plane 11, and at least this one was really hogging ressources! I’m wondering if my setup and that of a few others just might be causing this, for whatever cryptic (=Unity) reason.
Made it through the campaign! 18 hours. Overall, thumbs up.
I thought at first it was a bit too Portal 2 for me, with a bit too much area over which the interesting elements were scattered, but as the (many) missions went past and I learned to speak the timey wimey lingo as it were, I liked it more and more. It has those AHA moments when you work out the right combination of actions from all your selves, when it’s at its best. I might have liked even more focus on those apsects rather than on the shooty filler moments, but I don’t know what that would have looked like. It’s a bit like one of those Tower Defences where you do a fair amount of defending yourself, which isn’t playing as much to the strengths of this game, which are timeloops, teleports, portals and ‘towers’.
The EA build was stable for me and complete and just lacks skippable cutscenes. That is actually kind of an annoyance and is the one thing I think they need to address before ‘release’.
Give it a go for something a little different.
Ironically, I updated my video drivers into what seems to be the most buggy release in years!
That’ll teach me.
Got some Ubisoft funding. Cool.
That is cool! Time melters will only get better !
Finally releasing ‘for real’…
Oh wow, that reminds me of an old prototype I fell in love with years ago (Isochronous) but way more involved. Looks mind melting and very interesting!
Edit: and co-op?! February is not letting up.
This is out and I picked it up but haven’t had a chance to play it properly yet! Definitely getting Sang-Froid vibes from what little I’ve played. Looking forward to having a proper session with it soon.
I’m afraid I’m throwing in the towel on this, and pretty early, too. I’ve gotten to a set of trials in an early stage called “Newrisen”, where you play a five-stage level that presumably introduces the time shift gameplay through a series of puzzles. The game seems to imply they’re pretty simple, and this is where you’re tested to make sure you understand the gameplay mechanics.
Which I clearly don’t yet.
I had a really frustrating time getting through these challenges at “Newrisen”. I couldn’t get past a single one in fewer than a half-dozen tries, and not for lack of reading the “Grimoire” or trying to follow instructions, which felt a bit too vague. Even the mission-specific hints weren’t terribly helpful. A lot of it seemed to be getting the timing and positioning just right, and to me, it seemed awfully finicky, demanding. Klunky. I wasn’t quite comfortable with a mouse-and-keyboard, and I wasn’t quite comfortable with a controller. What did the developers expect me to do here? It feels like it’s supposed to be a Sacrifice-style interface, and that’s precisely the sort of thing I’d be interesting in learning and exploring.
But after these basic trials, I don’t think I have it in me to stick with this. : ( Someone who’s played further into the game get in here and berate me until I’m shamed into taking it back up!
Christian Donlan over at Eurogamer really loved it. 5/5 review:
Cool. I did play through this, in EA I guess, and had an entertaining time… too long ago to help out Tom though :)
I do recommend the game if you like the idea.
I need to check it out, I only played it when it was early in its early access (sic) as well, and had to stop after a while because it was very much overheating my machine.
I launched it and was reminded of the other thing that is quite a bummer: while the game has gamepad support, the prompts on screen don’t match. I have just been stumbling around trying to figure what to press and given the complexity and unusuality of the game, that hasn’t been going too well!
I’ve been waiting for the first patch after I reported a mouse sensitivity bug in the options. Got some time off next week so hoping to give this a proper go.
Early on it’s not as bad as you think, and it definitely pays to just hang out in the strategic/pause view so you can eyeball the routes, the enemies that drop mana wisps (which seem to be the biggest priority) and work out what order you should do things in. I got a bit hung up on trying to do as much as possible with my first echo, which makes sense, but most of the time you need your echoes to clear the way for future echoes to go further and collect more mana to infuse trees, summon spirits and whatnot. Once you’ve got over that initial new level bump and the mana starts rolling in, you can then start patching up all the weak spots in your defences. I’m still wrapping my head around good practices with the teleport so I can drop it somewhere far out to basically get future echoes out into the fray a lot quicker without interfering with previous echoes.
It’s a fascinating and exciting concept that I don’t think I’ve seen explored before, and it’s just incredibly cool seeing versions of yourself kicking butt over the other side of a valley or whizzing about overhead casting spells. I bet it’s wild co-op.
There is a lot to process in Timemelters though and while I’m several hours deep now with a few challenges under my belt, there are some elements that remain fuzzy: namely the mana wisps, greater moonstones and how I seem to gather a bunch of wisps over time with each new echo. I’m not sure what the relationship is there. My gut tells me it’s the wisps being collected by my previous echoes but then there’s an upgrade that does that… which I haven’t unlocked yet so I think something else is going on? I also wonder what happens when you infuse a tree before a previous echo does. Do you just overwrite their mana use? Do you get some back? Or is just a waste and we’re expected to track our previous actions? Maybe there’s a UI element I’m missing that shows it’s going to get infused?
Anyway, I’m really enjoying this and I’m interested to see where it goes.
I remember having all those questions but can’t remember any of the answers :) I do remember the answers all come though.
I think I struggled with those early tutorials too.
I think I was surprised how puzzly the game is in general. You often do have to pay attention to exactly how many mana balls each group can provide you, and exactly how big each group is, and exactly how many people can be grabbed by a tree, and make your plan allowing for exactly that. It was fine, but you do take a bunch of levels to figure stuff out. The whole game really, from what I remember.
I’ve been meaning to weigh in here after wrapping up the campaign last week. I loved it! It took me about 15-20 hours on ‘balanced’ difficulty with ‘extended’ story.
At first the scenarios feel quite puzzley because you’ll spend quite a while trying to work out your strategy: where you need to go first to start your mana/souls economy, when you need to be somewhere, where to put your teleport, when to use it etc. There’s a lot to juggle here and it’s pretty overwhelming early on but by the end I was zipping around like some kind of deadly chrono witch layering up timelines and co-operating with past versions of my deadly self. It’s such a clever game and orchestrating these kinds of manoeuvres and experiencing them play out as planned was always thrilling. There’s some improvising as well, just like there was in Sang-Froid when things deviated slightly. Time distortion in particular tripped me up a lot!
It wasn’t until I watched the store page stream that I realised levels could be done in different ways which was a real eye-opener. Yes, some levels are more rigid than others but the bigger ones with more moving parts allow for a fair bit of creativity with how you tackle them.
My only real issues: the voice acting, while there’s not much of it, can be a bit cheesy at times (not as bad as Sang-Froid’s!), and for a game that’s apparently set in Scotland, there’s only one Scottish accent and it’s an iffy one. There’s a race of characters introduced later in the game that don’t have vocal cords but somehow they have (annoying) voices. Despite that, I still found myself invested in it after some time and came to enjoy the story for all its time shenanigans. The other issue I had with it is that the default key binds require some finger gymnastics. Abilities 5-7 I remapped to Z, X and C. The bad thing with reaching for 5-7 is that I sometimes accidentally hit T which replaces your teleport marker—not good! Z, X and C massively improved the experience for me.
The challenges have been fun to chew on and I’m keen to try out the co-op campaign at some point. Anyway, yeah, I loved it! What a cool twist on real-time strategy.
So apparently I did get the upgrade which allows echoes to retrieve wisps. I never did get to see what happens if I infused a tree with a spirit before an echo does because I noticed that there is indeed a UI element that shows you how long it’ll be before an echo infuses it. This really helps you avoid doubling up. Really smart!