Monday, June 8, 2015

The Watchlist: Induction

Title: Induction
Developer: Bryan Gale
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux
2016
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A game about time travel and paradoxes
At first glance, Induction seems like a simple game. You maneuver a cube around various isometric levels, pushing objects, triggering switches, activating bridges. There are collapsing pathways and other obstacles to deal with, as well as figuring out how to navigate the multi-tiered levels, since your cube can only ascend ledges equal to its height. But then developer Bryan Gale adds time travel into the mix, and Induction is revealed to be a challenging puzzle game that reinvents your understanding of space and time. 
I was fortunate enough to try out a press demo of Induction and explore its time-based puzzles. These challenges start out simple enough; similar to Project Temporality and the freeware game Tessallation, you interact with your past self to co-ordinate actions, for example, activating a bridge in one timeline and then crossing in another. But soon, Induction introduces a new concept that I haven't seen in other time-travel puzzlers: paradoxes. At any point, pressing SHIFT lets you control your past self in the current timeline, creating a new time loop. These GIFs showcase the mechanic well:
While the actions of the purple cube remain in effect, that timeline is erased, leaving behind an alternate timeline consisting of the green and yellow cubes.
Induction's puzzles grow more complex from there, as you juggle actions across multiple time loops and alternate timelines.

Induction is still in development, planned to release sometime in 2016, and was recently Greenlit. You can follow its progress on the developer's Twitter page.

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