Another game that successfully managed to use rhizomatic foreshadowing is 12 Minutes by Luis Antonio.
This is a puzzle game whose main mechanic is narrative, making it a very interesting subject of study.
The game is designed around executing a series of actions with a time limit (12 minutes).
After that time you're forced to go back to the start.
Forcing you to play it over and over again in increasingly creative ways to get more information.
You can try different dialog lines, and perform different actions to unlock subtle branches that slowly start to paint the picture of what's going on.
That might already be enough to make a whole game, but the designer took it a step further: the character remembers everything he does in each loop, same as the player.
This works very well for two reasons:
- It makes the actions you take believable. Why would the character hide in a closet if he doesn't know someone is coming for him?
- It enables additional paths that only get unlocked after you got a piece of information.
This last point is very interesting to me because it's a form of reaction to the state that (beyond Groundhog Day) I had not seen executed so well in video games.
It seems to me that there is a lot of room to explore with temporal loops beyond 12 Minutes.
I feel there is an entire genre to be explored there.
Do you know any other game that uses temporal loops as a way to control the exponential explosion of the rhizome?
I would love to play other similar experiences that are not necessarily detective-oriented...
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