I have an open question for y'all that I'm super curious about!
How do you feel about games with overarching, relevant time limits? This includes things like Majora's Mask, Unsighted, Persona, or Pikmin... anything where there is a deadline that influences your experience and how you play.
I've heard many people say over the years that they disliked or outright could not play Majora's Mask because of the moon timer, which makes me curious about the general feeling on these kinds of mechanics.
I'd love to hear what you think in the comments, and please feel free to elaborate!
- Why do you like, dislike, or not mind overarching time limits?
- How does the game structure change things? (long-term limit, short-term limit, ability to plan ahead, ability to increase or reset the timer, etc.)
- Do you have different views on active timers (Majora's Mask) vs. turn-based timers (Persona 5)?
- Are there examples of games with time limits that you really like or dislike?
Thank you for all of your thoughts!!
~ Lily
So I'm pretty sure this ISN'T what OP is asking for but I can't resist doing a ramble on this because I play a LOT of games with time limits and have Thoughts:
Time limits are a game design tool that facilitate a variety of outcomes.
Like all tools, there are reasons and places to use and not-use them, but the key element is that they're there to enable things. Different styles of tone, of expectation, of exploration. Changing depending on the game, depending on your creative goals, pacing goals, player expectations and style of communication.
Let's go over some of them, with examples.
Facilitating multiple outcomes and replays: Mask of the Rose
Time as actions, choices. Turns. A game where you are given many options and must pick the ones you think are most valuable. Common in visual novels, raising sims, and anything following in the footsteps of Slay the Spire, the time limit as a method to prevent the player from seeing everything in a single go-round - and to prevent them from strip-mining every detail of the game, exhausting every possible avenue like a big cake that you eat until there's nothing left. This kind of design is the lynchpin of the game that aims to be "replayable", ensuring that breadcrumbs of New Experience are left for the player for tens, maybe hundreds, of runs through the game.
Mask, a mystery/romance visual novel, uses this to facilitate a dense simulation; the player is only given enough time to pursue a few of the overall opportunities presented to them, and with a huge cast of romanceable characters and activities, the limits on the number of player actions provide plenty of fodder for run after run to feel like roleplaying entirely different people each time - after all, you couldn't possibly do all the same things again in the same order. Even basic choices like your character's personality or background unlock locations at different times, other dialogue options, providing different spins on the same conceits. In addition to its value as a replay tool, this kind of design is key to providing a sense of depth and mystery to a setting - the more a player understands where the edges of a game's spaces lie, the less mystique has a hold over them. They must not know when a threat is a bluff. They must not know when a choice is unlikely to yield results. They must not know how close they are to done. The sense of a game that feels like it must infinitely expand beyond the player's knowledge requires a careful control of that player's knowledge. In all games it will fade eventually, but time limits work to delay that fading - perhaps beyond the end of the game - in the same way that secrets do in, say, The Stanley Parable. A positive form of obfuscation. And, in some ways, a goal for players to chase - understanding.
As a pacing mechanism: Atelier
The Atelier series of crafting-rpgs is most known for its time limits, but has gone through a long process of shedding them in recent years, leaving us with an interesting set of games that makes arguments both for and against the system in almost every type of setting.
Where Atelier games use time limits, they act as a form of Pacing. Atelier games are slow and cautious processes by nature. Gathering and crafting make up the vast majority of the activities that players will be spending the game doing, and that can have a pretty obvious failure mode; players boring themselves until they bounce off of the game. The key example of this is perhaps Atelier Sophie, a game that gives the player so little direction that experiementation is perhaps the only way forward; it's possible to spend hours and hours and make no narrative progress, if only because you're exploring your possibilities and, perhaps, do not understand what "progress" means in this situation.
But even the Atelier games with clearer design have a very different understanding of Focus when you compare the presence - of absence - of time limits. Early games in the franchise demand a specific sort of focus from the player - with crafting a single item eating up days and possibly even weeks of game time, fucking around is only acceptable within certain bounds. And as such, the value of sitting there and thinking things out becomes far more valuable. The player is forced to pay attention, to work to understand mechanics they might otherwise dismiss as too strange or complex, because trial-and-erroring it is not viable. For players who love to dig into a system but might trap themselves in an endless loop of grinding, this pacing keeps them focused and with their eyes constantly on their next goal, keeping earlier atelier games at a kind 30-to-40-hour pacing that feels refreshing to complete but not exhausting.
There is, of course, the flip side. Players who struggle can fall behind - or simply become too stressed out to continue. The games are demanding in a way many modern games simply are Not. The threat of an unavoidable game over and restart hanging over your head if you're too slow is a lot for some people who are just looking for entertainment. In that context, it's not surprising to me that the Atelier series has grown in popularity primarily as it's backed away from this as a pacing mechanism, instead working towards carrot-instead-of-stick ways of keeping players on track, like constantly tantalizing them with "the next area" they need to do some sort of work to unlock. Modern atelier has faith that if they tempt you enough, and keep your goals clear and unambigious, you will pursue them without further incentive. I don't think this ALWAYS works, but I can't deny it's a much chiller experience.
As an aside, Atelier has experimented with time limits in some interesting ways that I think have led to a good point of comparison.
- Full-game time limits, where you have a single goal and [x] in-game years to complete them feature heavily early-on in the franchise, and IMO are the most stressful to work on, especially in the games where it's less-than-clear what your goals might be in the immediate sense. IMO these are the ones where you end up making the most paranoid levels of backup saves. I suspect that for pros, they're rather freeing, as you can speedrun your way to the finale and then mess around as much as you like with your extra time, but it's a casual player's nightmare.
- Successive time limits, where you're given a goal every [x] months and need to keep pace. IMO these are kinder and genuinely can be pretty fun; It's very, very obvious on a minute-to-minute level whether you're ahead of or behind the game's expectations, and they allow the game to facilitate little incentives, like bonus rewards for doing extra activities for each goal, that bring the passage of time far more into the present as a thing the player is interacting with rather than being oppressed by. It also means the player knows they can look forward to something new every so often. If lack of clarity is vital to a mysterious-feeling tone and setting, then having clarity and consistency, clear boundaries and clear expectations, are vital to helping them get into calm and confident rhythms of play. Which is another form of tone in and of itself!
As a way of expressing urgency and foreshadowing consequences: Citizen Sleeper
There's a tabletop term called "Showing the barrel of the gun". It's about the GM being clear about when they're putting the player characters under threat - "if you do or don't do this, there may be consequences" - and it's also about following through on that threat if they fail to mitigate it.
Citizen Sleeper isn't really a game with an overall time limit, but its early and midgame use tight time limits heavily as a way of impressing fear and urgency onto the player. The player is in hiding from the corporation that uses them as slave labour, they have no money, they have no home, they're in desperate need of medication - money to pay for all these things. Many games put you in situations like this where they end up turning into power fantasies; the player can simply do all the work in existence in a whirlwind of Productivity Fantasy frenzy. Even games like animal crossing that limit many of your actions per-day don't try to - or want to - make you fear the housing debt you're in. They're for taking your time.
Citizen Sleeper uses the passage of time, and your limited actions that progress it, to constantly drive home how desperate your situation is by ensuring that it is impossible to solve all of your problems in a timely manner. Inevitably, the best juggler will drop a few plates, and when that happens the game brings you into new stages of threat, both reinforcing the desperate situation you're in - and creating new and strange opportunities. I actually feel that Citizen Sleeper is at its strongest during these moments, when its stories about mutual aid and poverty have real impact because the player feels constantly caught in that poverty's grip, and each tiny bit of help they get feels like a warm outreached hand from a friend. It's once those obstacles are overcome and stories completed, that the game begins to slowly grow detached, important cast members fading away as their 'content' is exhausted. Part of me wishes the game had had a broader time limit, in this context. The endgame as it stands feels deeply lonely. But while that early urgency lasts- damn, there's not much like it.
As a way of making time into a space that can be explored: Majora's Mask
Majora is an interesting entry on this list because I think it's the one in which the player has the most control over time. Once you get the song of time and the ocarina, you can damn well reset any time you want to. The pressure, then, is applied to the player in the form of what they might lose when resetting time, and as such, I am grouping this separately because while there are elements of pacing there - many of the examples on this list, and others you might think of, share many of the elements I've explained - I think majora's big epiphany at the time was using time as a form of space.
Every NPC in Majora's Mask has a schedule they adhere to every day, and a new one each day. A shifting landscape of opportunities that close and open as the player moves through each of these days, over and over again. From a design standpoint, you could almost compare them to rooms - in this one you pull a lever to move a rock so that when you go to the next one so you can go through a door, etc. Looping Termina over and over again is, primarily, an opportunity for the player to explore that space, to learn the opportunities offered to them and then to later take advantage of them. The only difference is that their control of their movement from room to room is much more limited; a linear, infinitely looping path.
In this sense it's hard NOT to see the time loop mechanic as a simple extension of what zelda already does with dungeon design - letting you see a bunch of things and then act on them once you understand it. From LttP onward, one of the core elements of zelda has been level-design foreshadowing, plopping a mysterious door or gimmick in front of you and making you wonder how you might interact with it until later knowledge or items recontextualize it. In that sense, you might even argue that this time system was a natural extension of the design goals of the franchise, baking foreshadowing into the game on a level that the player is forcibly pulled through, again and again. A new and different way of showing the player a world that feels bigger than them, one that they slowly grow to understand completely. This is the core zelda power fantasy.
Obviously, this is a mechanic that tends to be confined to time loop games, whether it's the player or the player character who's the one experiencing them. But then, I guess you could argue that the act of replaying a game is always a time loop for the person behind the controller. Undertale certainly played with that conceit. So I always love seeing new entries in this particular space.
I've Run Out Of Things To Say
This is all to say that from a dev standpoint, I don't think time limits are "bad" or "good" or even inherently stressful. I think this is all details of design, execution, presentation. Like pretty much everything in a game, it's all creative decisions made with a goal in mind. How we feel about them is about how successfully those goals are realized, and how we relate to them from our own perspectives. I always love to see design experimentation and I hope designers think of time as an option they can always tug on and see how it affects things. Special shoutout, in that sense, to Time Bandit, which is my current fav in terms of how it plays with time and genre expectations. (But you've all seen me ramble about that more than enough in past posts).
In closing: videogames
