Navigating the surreal world of Timelie gives players a unique experience that they would be hard-pressed to gain from many other video games. In the first few moments of Timelie players are granted the ability to manipulate time and alter aspects of the world around them. By using these powers, players are able to rewind time to prevent their own death or solve stealth based puzzles. Timelie alters the way players see the world around them much like how the Portal series did.
Timelie begins with an unnamed protagonist trapped in an abstract world populated by robots intent on capturing her. She spends the early moments of the game trying to escape these robots to the best of her abilities, but finds that she isn't fast enough to avoid them. After a bridge collapses and the girl plunges to her death, she realizes that she can rewind time and stop herself from falling. This sets up the rest of the game as the player must use the time powers to avoid robots in all the following levels.
Gameplay in Timelie is focused around stealth-based puzzles as players must find a way to move around the environment without being discovered by patrolling robots. Every step that the girl takes also causes the robots to move, so the player must time movements perfectly to those of the enemies to avoid their gaze. Players will also need to use their powers to both rewind and progress time around them in order to open doors, avoid enemies, or rebuild broken parts of the environment.
Eventually the girl comes across a cat that accompanies the player through the rest of the game. Players can move the cat around the environment in tandem with the girl, adding an extra layer of challenge to the puzzles of Timelie. Timelie is much like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons in that it is an exclusively single-player video game that focuses on cooperative gameplay.
The difficulty of Timelie escalates slowly as players progress, and new mechanics are introduced with enough space in between that it's easy to grasp one concept before moving on. By the end of the game the concepts of manipulating time will become second nature to players, and it is very exciting to complete the more difficult later puzzles.
Timelie offers a unique experience and is an impressive piece of work considering it is Urnique Studios' first major release. Much like Braid or Celeste before it, it would not be surprising if Timelie became an extremely important and talked about indie title for a lot of gamers. Anyone who enjoys indie games or puzzles should buy a copy of Timelie as soon as possible.
Timelie releases for PC on May 21, 2020. A Steam code was provided for the purposes of this review.