[rttlesnke]

I think I've seen a similar mechanic in the critically acclaimed side-scroller Braid [1]. There's a world called "Time and Place" where the flow of time is tied to the player's horizontal position. Going right and left takes you forward and backward in time respectively, and standing pauses it. Amazing game, really.

Also, a new game from the creator (Jonathan Blow) is scheduled to release this year, The Witness [2].

[1] http://braid-game.com/

[2] http://the-witness.net/

[aidos]

I got Braid after watching the movie Indie Game. I don't ever really play games anymore but I really enjoyed it.

The mechanic in Braid is clever in a bunch of ways. The key idea is that you can reverse time, so you never totally die. As the game advances things start being tied to the movement of time in strange ways. Sometimes not everything though - so you can (and need to) craft convergences of certain objects in order to solve various puzzles.

I'd highly recommend it.

[brusch64]

I was not so thrilled when playing Braid. First of all I really liked the idea - but after some levels it got cumbersome. Some of the events can not be rolled back totally - so you have some annoying levels, where you have to start from the beginning (at least this is my foggy memory).

The story was absolutely cheesy - I simply lost interest in it. Which is not really something unusual, because I am not a gamer at all.

[level]

The story was only cheesy if you took it at face value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_(video_game)#Plot

[qbrass]

You can say that about any story.

[prezjordan]

Cheesy?! Did you finish the game?

[smellf]

Wow, the Braid gameplay was damn different - not completely original, it was definitely influenced by Viewtiful Joe - but certainly a departure from the standard sidescroller action.

But the story was truly remarkable - in my top five best game stories, easy. As others have mentioned, you must not have played for very long.

[danso]

I never watched that movie but I bought Braid and beat it...I respect Blow's commitment to artistry solely from how good Braid was, but I do admit to wishing he would take the half-easy route and make an add-on/sequel of sorts, to build upon such a unique world he created. Not all sequels have to be commercial derivatives (Portal 2 was pretty good, as was the sequel to the original Katamari Damacy game)

On a technical perspective...I'm sure he's written about this...but how does Braid manage to keep what I assume is a total record of gameplay? That is, theoretically, you could leave the game on for a very long time and rewind it...at some point, the console's memory runs out, right? I'm saying this as someone who really has no idea how little resources it takes to pop/push game events off a stack...I'm just assuming that if Photoshop has an undo-limit, Braid would have one too?

(Though Photoshop is different in that the program has to anticipate the user leaping back 5000 steps in a single go, where as with Braid, the player only has access to the top of the stack of events)

On further reflection, games that have "replay/ghost" modes, where a speed-record is overlaid atop the current game layer, invoke the same event-recording mechanic without trouble, so I guess I'm just overestimating how much space an abstracted game event/state would take to record.

[slazaro]

I assume it doesn't record what happens every frame, but specific events. That way if you don't move, it doesn't write anything until you do. Some record systems only record player input.

[krsna]

Jonathan Blow gave a tech talk at GDC about how the rewind mechanic was implemented. It turns out that he does in fact save the non-constant game state of every frame. Around 6:20 is where he talks about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSeYShR-OG0

[DanielRibeiro]

... also jblow on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jblow (he does comment quite often).