Timelie Offers Up a Time-Travelling Girl, Her Cat, and a Lot of Robots

Timelie (not Timeline) is a stealth puzzle game from Urnique Studios, an indie developer from Thailand, and it’s certainly a tough game to crack. The lead characters —  a girl and her unusually intelligent cat —  solve puzzles using the girl’s time manipulation powers. Timelie won best game back in 2016 at the Microsoft Imagine Cup and Unique has been quietly working away ever since.

Each level starts with your nameless character using her powers to look ahead and predict her actions to solve the puzzle. You manipulate time with the Q and E buttons (forward and backwards, respectively) and use the spacebar to reverse time on specific objects, like broken bridges, with powerups. The girl can open and shut doors with keypads, and both her and the cat can use pressure pads or meow to distract enemies. You get a limited amount of time to work in —  eventually you can’t fast forward any further, and a few levels in this demo were also collapsing as I played through, which was quite nerve-wracking. 

These puzzles are punishing. You’ve got to be really quite precise with your timing (no pun intended) to get through them, and even then you’ll only get through by the skin of your teeth on some. Those collapsing levels are, oddly, the easiest of the bunch. It’s the robotic guards that consistently gave me the most trouble. They’re shockingly quick, to the point of frustration. One very early puzzle gave me a huge amount of trouble because the robot was just too quick for me to lock into a room. 

Unfortunately, I had a lot of crashes —  five in the first ten minutes, which doesn’t bode well. Urnique says the demo is based on an older build and timestamps on the files back that up, but it’s something to note, and I expect (and hope) that the review build will have addressed them. Interestingly, the demo I played also contained data for the Mac OS build, but there’s no mention of a Mac port anywhere. Overall I had a good time with the demo —  Timelie and Urnique Studios are certainly worth keeping an eye on. 

Timelie launches on Steam on May 21st. Check back on Jump Dash Roll for our full review!