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JohnEvansChronotron is at its heart a conventional puzzle-platformer; your little guy appears on the screen along with his Tardis, and somewhere else on the screen is a "time machine" part you need to retrieve and return to your Tardis. Arrow keys to move (up-arrow to jump), with the occasional crate to pick up and move, buttons to stand or put crates on, and so forth. We've seen this before.
What we haven't seen before, is the "time travel" effect. That is, lots of people have been experimenting with time travel in one form or another in indie games recently, perhaps inspired by Braid, but Chronotron uses the motif in a straight-forward way that works very well in a platform-puzzler context. By returning to your Tardis and pressing the space bar, you hop in, and then reappear--and so does your previous self, who goes off and performs whatever actions you performed the last time you left the Tardis.
Thus, "yourself" is a resource you can use to, say, hold buttons down so your more recent self can get where you want to go. An example is perhaps the best way of explaining: In the level pictured above, the solution is this: self one goes and stands on the left pylon, pressing it down and elevating the other, for 30 seconds or so. Self 2 waits for ten seconds, then joins self 1 on the left pylon, elevating the right pylon further. Self 3 runs to the right pylon, jumps atop it (this is why self 2 waits, to give self 3 enough time). When self 2 jumps on the left pylon, the right is now high enough for self 3 to jump up to the area with the machine part. He can then easily enough return to the Tardis with it.
Chronotron has neither the elaborate and imaginatively detailed exploration of the time mechanics that Braid provides, nor its evocative story; but Chronotron is a simple, satisfying, and enjoyable exploration of the effects of one novel mechanic on a well-established form.
Also...
Chronotron was chosen as one of the PAX 10, a group of 10 indie games to be exhibited at Penny Arcade Expo.
Cursor*10 uses a similar
Cursor*10 uses a similar cooperate with yourself mechanism
http://www.nekogames.jp/mt/2008/01/cursor10.html and I'm sure there's a Zelda game (possibly a hand held itteration) which uses this mechanic too.
Chronotron - Developer Comments
It was indeed inspired by an article about the upcoming Braid, and also the T.V. ad for Blinx, (which I never played, but heard was bad)
TimeBot and Cursor*10 both came out during the development of Chronotron. It's true that past-self cooperation is not unique to Chronotron. The difference is that Chronotron gives you unlimited iterations, and uses platform game physics. The unique thing introduced by Chronotron was the Paradox system, that's the only "innovation" I can take credit for.
There is no Zelda game I'm aware of that uses a time-travel mechanic that lets you cooperate with your past self. The Four-Swords games and Minish Cap let you cooperate with lock-step clones, and Oracle of Ages and Ocarina of Time let you set up events in the past to take advantage of in the future (such as planting a seed to make a vine appear). A time-clone Zelda game would be really fun though. I'd like to see them do it.
The Four-Swords games and
The Four-Swords games and Minish Cap let you cooperate with lock-step clones
yeah that's what I was thinking of.
It's really interesting how all of a sudden we're seeing lots of games playing with time travel (the aforementioned examples alongside Prince of Persia and a couple of others), it seems to be a subject that videogames are uniquely well equipped to deal with what with the whole free choice vs determinism thing being so inherent and easy to illustrate/ play around with in the medium and in a way it's a little surprising that it's taken so long to get to.
Whatever, Chronotron is great.
Temporal
I've seen this mechanic before, and the robot is a little suspiciously similar... But this is a Flash implementation, instead of a PC executable.
http://www.potato-factory.com/temporal/