I've always been fascinated by time travel, especially the consistent-history kind. Back to the Future left me lukewarm; I preferred 12 Monkeys or Primer. And I was delighted that Rowling pulled one off in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, with Harry casting the Patronus because he'd already seen himself do it. I love the idea that you can travel back in time but can't just change anything you like. Everything has to make sense. There is real depth there.
I wanted a puzzle game that really explored that idea. There are some excellent time travel games, like The Talos Principle and Braid, but in those your past selves only ever help your future ones. What if you could go back in time and make life easier for an earlier version of yourself? What if you could unlock a door before your earlier self got there, or switch off a detector beam you'd already walked through?
So I made a game like that.
In Time Travel Heist, you might send your first self straight through a detector beam at turn 5. Then you travel back to turn 0 as a second self, switch off the detector at turn 3, and now your first self was never in danger. You have to work out how to make the timelines fit together, a bit like a time jigsaw.
You can do the same with objects. Pick up a key, travel back, and use it to unlock a door before your earlier self arrives. Or pick up a screwdriver, travel back, and use it to remove that obligatory air duct cover before anyone has actually picked up the screwdriver.
On later levels you have four versions of yourself working together. The trick is planning their actions so everything happens at the right moment. Every door, detector and duct has to be dealt with somehow, and sometimes the solution means doing things in a very different order from the one you'd expect.
It's turn-based, so you can take as long as you like over every move. There are more than 50 hand-built levels, and the later ones can take an evening. It's set in 1928, as you investigate a mysterious radio signal from five centuries in the future.
Play Time Travel Heist on Android →
Free to try. One-time unlock for the full game. No ads.