Stuck In Time is a game that tries to be an idle game with the twist that you constantly loop, moving your character around, fighting enemies, leveling up, collecting items and mana, all to stay alive and have the longest loop possible until you eventually run out of power and need to restart all over again, keeping small incremental upgrades and familiarity with the map in order to make further loops easier. It’s also a neat-looking world that is like a big puzzle to solve. Sadly, for my tastes, it fails in both aspects.
First and foremost, the game has some mechanics that I really enjoyed in a small web-only game called “Idle Loops”, namely that you have a list of actions, create yourself a loop and then start and leave the loop running for a while. Maybe you run out of mana because you didn’t grab enough potions, maybe you discovered a new action after a while and doing it first makes the rest of the loop easier, maybe you’ll do some specific action a ton because it raises one stat that you need, it’s easy because it’s just a list of actions and you don’t need to visualize them much.
With Stuck In Time, however, you plan moves around on a map, and any tweak to your loop might require serious retooling. Going clockwise to counterclockwise for instance is not just a question of changing a few actions. Because moving around takes time, you can’t just easily check if something would work, so it makes trial and error a bit frustrating. You also cannot see at every point in a stopped loop where you were and how the map was, so it’s not possible to figure out which resources were still available at the end. The interface works fairly well, but for very long lists of actions that twist and turn around, it gets really confusing.
The actual moving around is interesting and I enjoyed it on the surface, figuring out the best paths to be collecting fireflies to restore my mana when needed, fighting enemies to level up and improve your stats - but being sure to go back and get more mana - talking to characters and doing actions in a specific order (if you steal carrots, the old man wont talk to you anymore, but you need those to get gold from the fisherman, so you have to talk to the old man first) and finding gear and skills here and there was neat, but the part where it’s an idle game breaks it down for me. Because you can ‘grind’ making things easier and very slowly incrementing some stats each and every loop, it’s not really a puzzle anymore. It’s a puzzle that can be solved by brute force. Maybe there is a way to ‘solve’ the game, but you could also futz around for days until anything you try just works.
I really couldn’t tell if Stuck In Time wanted to be more of an idle game or a puzzle, but both sides left me wanting. After playing it for a few days - and being surprised that the game is made out of multiple maps - I tried to push and explore by defeating a powerful enemy. I died because I didn’t grind enough, that was it for me. There are some really cool ideas here, but I just couldn’t get into it.
