It’s hard to understate how much the biggest enemy in all of gaming is time. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fast-action arcade game needing cutting-edge reflexes or a turn-based RPG, the biggest trick is always going to be time management. In an action title this is obvious, seeing as it’s your reflexes against theirs plus a knowledge that needs to be ingrained on a near-instinctual level as to how long the powerful fancy skills take to execute, but even with all the time in the world in a turn-based game it’s still a matter of dispatching the enemy in the fewest moves so they have less opportunity to inflict damage. Some games go out of their way to make this obvious, like SuperHot’s “time moves when you do” mechanic or the Mysterious Dungeon games where everyone’s turn happens simultaneously. Enter the Chronosphere is a little more Mysterious Dungeon than SuperHot, but borrows far more from the action-roguelike genre than turn-based RPG.
Time In a Sphere, Time In a Bottle, Same Thing
If Enter the Chronosphere played how it looked then it would be something much closer to Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon than the clever time-managment roguelike it actually is. Each move takes about a half a second to perform, with both enemy and player’s actions happening as if it was your standard reflex-based run into a randomly-generated dungeon. Enemies move, bullets go flying, grenades tick towards exploding, and you hope you’ve planned as best possible to avoid all of it while doing some damage of your own. A round consists of a single action, whether that’s firing the gun, using a special ability, or simply moving, and the trick to survival is remembering what all the tools you’ve accumulated during a run can do.
Enter the Chronosphere Dares You to Tackle its New Demo Next Week
After making a splash at PAX East earlier this year, Effort Star is bringing the demo of Enter the Chronosphere to everyone for a limited time.
For example, each character comes with their own special and passive ability, and in the demo the active moves are Marcia with her dodge-roll and Urtar with a bullet-canceling ground pound that also pushes enemies away. The active abilities are meant to be relied on, recharging after only a few turns, and meeting certain goals can unlock new active and passive skills to change how the character plays. Once the run through the Chronosphere starts, though, each level has a chest that can add more abilities on top of that, so in standard roguelike fashion the character you’ve got at the end of a run can play very differently from the one that starts it.
Each level including the very simple first one also contains a weapon, with the disclaimer that friendly fire is on for both you and the enemies. A gun that fires a volley of grenades can be a thing of beauty and a joy forever until a tight corridor focuses all those little explosions on you, and a drill-shot that not only fires through walls but also sends out a wave of bullets every few feet is great until you accidentally catch up with the back-end of its smaller shots. The kunai can shoot down enemy bullets, shotguns and double-barreled machine guns make up for weaker pellets with a whole lot of them per shot, the mining laser is strong but short-ranged, etc. You can carry up to two guns at once and with a little care even the weirder ones can be part of dangerous arsenal. Which doesn’t mean you should ever pass up the rocket launcher, of course, because let’s not get crazy here.
What makes the Enter the Chronosphere demo sing isn’t so much that it’s your standard roguelike adventure mixed with a fancy time-stop function, but that the action just feels good once you get a sense of how combat should flow. During PAX East it was Kyle’sgame of the show, and now that I’ve been able to sit down and play it comfortably at home that makes perfect sense. Once you get a feel for the action even the very hard levels are manageable; it’s just a matter of slipping into the game’s flow and figuring out how to prioritize. The varying attacks and abilities mean even the popcorn enemies can be dangerous in swarms, and a solid attack from the bigger ones can bring a run to an end very quickly. Learn the skills, manage the threats, and stop to think when necessary, and escaping through the heart of the Chronosphere may just work out after all.
Enter the Chronosphere’s demo is/was part of the Steam Endless Replayability Fest, andcan be found here. If that came to an end, a very old and super-basic prototype is still available onthe itch.io page.
