It’s Leap Day, so let’s celebrate with time travel

Time travel is absolutely possible, "Juegos De" no matter what the naysayers may claim—just so long as you’re fully committed to traveling in one direction. Just last night, you time traveled from yesterday to today, and you should feel very proud of yourself. Further adventures through the temporal plane take place every time you switch the clocks for daylight saving time and, perhaps most excitingly, once every four years when we literally insert a full 24 hours into our reality. Join us as we celebrate this act of chronarchy, recognizing the leap year by pulling together some of the best time travel games to play on your PC.
 

Cris Tales

2021’s Cris Tales was created as a love letter to classic Japanese-style RPGs but without falling into the tropes of too many games that try the same. Boasting a unique and eye-catching art style (more My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic than Earthbound), it wears its inspirations—like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, and Bravely Default—on its sleeve while creating a unique battle format of its own.

In Cris Tales, your character Crisbell coexists in the past, present, and future, being able to see all three on a single screen. She’s also accompanied by a time-hopping frog called Matias who can leap through the fabric of chronology (and yes, he’s a tadpole in the past). This time-spanning reality plays out in combat too, where Crisbell can warp enemies between time zones, taking advantage of their youth or old age to gain the upper hand in battle. When it comes to implementing time travel into a game, you can’t really ask for a more direct and impactful approach.
 

Outer Wilds

Time travel always seems like such an opportunity, such a promise of freedom, until it’s delivered in the form of a loop. In Outer Wilds, you have just 22 minutes to explore a tiny solar system before its star goes supernova, and you wake up back at the start.

In each loop, you’ll use your 22 minutes to try to learn more about the extinct Nomai race, whose ancient statue enables you to retain information between runs, so that you can eventually discover the cause of this time loop and escape it. But you’ll have to grapple with an unwieldy spaceship, oxygen-starved planets, and underwater exploration in the meantime—albeit without much fear of death.
 

The Forgotten City

The Forgotten City began life as a time traveling Skyrim mod in 2015. So popular did it prove that its Australian developers, Modern Storyteller, spent several years crafting it into its own game.

You, a modern man, find yourself tumbling back to Ancient Rome in a city where the residents have been turned to gold. It turns out that if anyone in this city sins—breaking the Golden Rule—everyone dies, transmuted Midas-style. But time’s not done with you yet, and you’re stuck in a one-day time loop where everyone’s alive once more, and you must get to know them so that you can untangle this muddle of mysteries.

As it does all this, the game explores hefty subjects like what exactly is “sin” and how society interacts with the rules it creates for itself.
 

Kraken Academy!!

As with so many classic tales of boarding school, Kraken Academy casts you as a young man sent to join a filthy school where he must time travel through the same three days to save the world from impending doom. And he’s best friends with some sentient broccoli. And the headmaster might be a cat. Also, there’s a kraken living in the local pond, and he bestows you with your mighty quest. Usual stuff.

This is part pixel adventure, part visual novel, and all deeply strange. At any point, you can time travel back to the beginning of your time at the school, bringing with you all the items you may have picked up, but everyone else at the school will have forgotten everything that’s happened. To solve all the challenges and help out all of your classmates and teachers, you’ll need to relive those days over and over.
 

Genesis Noir

In an extraordinary piece of art, Genesis Noir presents the creation of the universe as an allegory for a murder in the present day. This is the conflation of a gunshot with the Big Bang, the formation of stars with the worship of celebrity, presented as ceaselessly inventive animation. It is time travel at its most expansive level yet utterly focused on the minutiae—and absolutely unlike anything else you’ll ever play.

It’s interactive, experimental, and utterly beautiful as you—a backstreet watch salesman—attempt to prevent the murder of a noirish dame after the gun has been fired. "juegos de 20" You need only find more time, sought through hypnagogic exploration of the formation of reality, which it’s fairly safe to say isn’t a plot you’ve experienced all too often.
 

Deathloop

The idea of taking the expansive scale of Arkane’s immersive sims (Dishonored 2, Prey) and somehow fitting them into a time loop story seems like it should be impossible. And yet, somehow the French studio pulls it off. Deathloop gives you a single day to assassinate eight targets, with time resetting to the start should any remain alive or you die in your attempts.

Of course, it’s not nearly that simple. The game is about using loops to learn the patterns of your many enemies, working out who is where and when, and attempting to craft the perfect day in which you can remove all eight without being caught. This is further complicated by each day being divided into four sections, and the game’s island divided into four regions, all eight targets in different places at different times with your actions earlier in one place perhaps affecting behaviors later in another. Yup, it’s a lot. Fortunately, you’re also armed with a wealth of weapons, skills, and abilities, as well as all the freedom over how you approach any situation that you’d expect from an Arkane game.
 

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

When Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time first came out, it was a revelation. A third-person action game where failure did not result in a dreary reloading of an early section but instead the ability to rewind time to the point of your mistake—and then put it right. It would surely become how all such games were played forever more. Except, somehow, no.

While we wait for the endlessly promised remake, it’s still worth returning to this 2003 original because, despite more than two decades passing, it remains an absolutely stunning piece of work. With its greater emphasis on exploration and climbing puzzles than the more combat-focused sequels, it’s also still the best of the trilogy it spawned.
 

Eternal Threads

Another entirely unique approach to presenting time travel in a game, Eternal Threads sees you as some sort of chrononaut, living in a future where abundant time travel has caused corruption across the timeline in the form of reality-altering radiation. People in your role travel back to specific points and attempt to make subtle changes to past events to allow the butterfly effect to correct the future.

In this instance, it was a house fire. Six people died who shouldn’t have, and so your role is to explore the burned remains from a first-person perspective, replaying events that occurred in the week running up to the fire in any order and changing seemingly minor decisions of the residents. The more you tweak, the more the future changes, until you’ve crafted a revised version of reality where everyone lives.

The house changes as you refine the past, giving the game a Gone Home-style environmental wealth of storytelling alongside a novel approach to gaming time travel.