TEMPUS Review

Game: TEMPUS
Genre: Puzzle, Adventure, First Person
System: Nintendo Switch (Also on Steam (Windows), Xbox One/X/S and PS4/5)
Developer | Publisher: K148 Game Studio | JanduSoft
Age Rating: US Everyone | EU 3+
Price: US $6.99 | UK £5.99 | EU € 6,99
Release Date: October 20th, 2022

Review code used, with many thanks to JanduSoft. 

Released for PC in March 2022, TEMPUS has now made its way to our consoles. It’s a puzzle adventure, played in the first-person, following the transformation of your island home through millennia.

So does time fly when you’re having fun, or is it all a bit of a drag?

Your Island Home

You start your time-travelling adventure on a stormy night in 2020. Strange lights are coming from the shed, and of course, you go and investigate.

A green gem with the instruction ‘grab’, and a strange pink component with the hint ‘drop’, are the only instructions to guide you through your adventure. On completing the initial puzzles, the portal activates and you step through.

Emerging 180 years later, your island is transformed. Your home, now in ruins, still houses the portal, however, it needs more power to function. There are new buildings to investigate and control buttons to find. And so the journey begins.

Some of the worlds are lovely to look at. There is a beauty to them and the movement of the grass in the breeze or the gently turning of the wind turbines is a delight to watch.

Each time you enter the portal, you travel to a new, future version of your island, each with its own characteristics and scenery. Some hint at peace and tranquillity, others at destruction and war.

As there is no audio or written narrative in TEMPUS, you are left to formulate your own thoughts as to what has happened to your island during the years.

Here’s a Puzzle, Hear a Puzzle

The game is about solving puzzles, such as matching symbols, following mazes and completing sequences, there is even a basketball game to play. Each puzzle leads to a new puzzle or leads to the activation buttons needed to power the portal. The vast majority of the puzzles are straight forward and they need to be, there are no hints. There were a couple which I really didn’t know how to solve, but trying different combinations gave me the answer, luckily there weren’t too many combinations to try!

Several of the islands’ worlds are set at night, and it is exceptionally hard to see some of the clues. These night scenes sometimes contain flashing lights, flickering screens or lightning storms, helpful to illuminate the room, but not pleasant on the eyes, and it didn’t make for enjoyable gameplay.

There is one puzzle which requires you to listen to a tune and then repeat it on a keyboard. I mention this specifically, as for some this might be too frustrating or simply impossible to complete.

Gameplay

There is no guidance as to what button does what. After 5 hours of play, walking slowly to the last portal, I accidentally pushed down on the control stick and discovered I ran. Gosh, I wish I had found that earlier, especially when the autosave was so temperamental.

I had to restart once after I couldn’t successfully load my game. The loaded game took me back to several puzzles but in such a way that it thought I’d completed them. Hence, I couldn’t replay them and acquire the green light needed to open a door.

Conclusion

TEMPUS has moments of brilliance, some of the puzzles are cleverly constructed and satisfying to complete. However, the console controls for moving the on-screen cursor are too frustrating to make the overall experience pleasurable.

Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure