Still Time review for PS Vita, PS4

Judging Still Time appropriately is something of a challenge.

See, it’s a bad game, but it’s not a traditionally bad game. It doesn’t try and pound you over the head with the same bad jokes, repeated over and over again. It’s not out to make you spend as much money as possible. It’s not a boring, grind-heavy slog. It’s not even unplayably broken.

That last one comes closest to describing what’s wrong with Still Time, though. Think of it as…playably broken, I guess. The game features an intriguing core mechanic — the ability to manipulate time and create clones to help you solve a series of puzzles — that doesn’t actually work 100% of the time. In fact, it doesn’t even work, like, 75% of the time. It works roughly half the time, and there never seems to be any rhyme or reason as to when it will work, and when you’ll be left uselessly holding down the rewind button.

This is a shame, because otherwise, Still Time shows a lot of promise. On top of the neat (albeit somewhat theoretical) mechanic, it features a fun story about time travel, coupled with some charming pixel art graphics. In another world — which is to say, one where the gameplay’s main draw wasn’t a mess — it’d be easy to see this game turning into a quirky indie hit.

Of course, that relies on a pretty big “if”: If it weren’t broken, Still Time would be a lot of fun. The fact it is broken — and in a pretty unpredictable way to boot — pretty much negates the fun aspect. Instead, all you’re left with is a wish that the game could be rewound to a point in time where it wasn’t built around a feature that didn’t quite work right.