In the Octopath Traveler 2 demo, you have three hours per save to grab as many characters you can, experience their story prologues, and explore the initial world.
There's a catch: if you're in a dungeon... you can keep going for as long as you want. And if "time" is frozen, are you trapped or free to do whatever you want?
I've been accused from time to time of unnecessarily anthropomorphizing characters in games or attributing game spaces with a certain sort of mysticism at odds with mathematical realities of the code and craft that make them possible. To many people, particularly some of the audiences I wrote for as a journalists, games are hard facts. They are rulesets. They are numbers. They are stubborn things. I've never felt this way.
There is, I think, a fraught relationship between players and characters. There is, I think, a absurdity to game spaces which is hard to ignore. A long time ago (2015 or 2016!) I made a small little YouTube video about going out of bounds in games. There is a way in which the world attempts to trap and corral the player. It contracts upon them and conjures barriers to keep them from looking behind the scenes. Whenever players push beyond these impositions, it is paradoxically an abrogation of trust and also an act of intimacy. In the former case, the player forces their way into spaces they are not "allowed" and thus there is a sort of violation that occurs. Yet, in moving into ethereal realms and the nonsense geometries beyond regular view, the player also gains a deeper understanding of the world and the pillars that keep it from collapsing. In the way, glitches and out of bounds movement is not a trick or ad hoc hostage situation where the player forces a game into an unwanted configuration; it is a process which brings players closer to texts.
But this doesn't mean there are not situations where the player cannot break the harmony of a world or act in ways which are petulant and cruel. In my 2019 animation microtalk at GDC, I offered a term which upset YouTuber commenters (to the point they openly discussed my sanity) when talking about player actions: tyranny. There are moment when a player's desires differ greatly from the motivations and wants of the characters they control. Where the puppeteers can pull the strings in ways that are entirely contrary to anything supported in the text. This is not some type of "ludo-narrative dissonance," a term which is woefully overused and which has long since lost meaning. It is, however, a crossroads where two different "people" are in conflict. If I can force Arthur Morgan—who is, as his game's title suggests, seeking his soul's redemption—to commit gross scales of mass murder, I am ultimately forcing him to act in a way contrary to his implies morals and character. Whereas the moments players and the actors they control are in agreement (for instance: both want to survive a boss fight) signify a bonding between parties, the moments where players do force actors to behave in gross contrast to their ethics or instincts signifies a concerning type of control.
This isn't to suggest that I, as some commenters in 2019 suggested, believe game characters are truly alive. I merely think that thought experiments that allow actors and their worlds deeper validity can lead to interesting questions about interactivity.
So! That was a long preamble to reach Octopath Traveler!
In Octopath Traveler 2's demo, there is nominally a 3 hour limit to your save file but this only triggers in the overworld. It does not trigger in dungeons spaces and I suspect it will not trigger in cutscenes either. This leads to an interesting hack that many die-hard fans use to power-level their party and access a stockpile of gold and supplies before the game's release and the "true" start of their adventures. The game clock suspends at 3:00:00 and does not increase even if you spend hours and hours within a dungeon fighting monsters and leveling far outside the range of the area's recommendations.
I tested this myself. I ended the demo with a party of four travelers clocking in at around level 11 or 12 before entering a dungeon with a level sixteen threat level and seeing how high I could go in terms of powering up my characters. As of this writing, my party is now level 30 and it's clear that I could continue inside this dungeon for days and days. All the way up until the game's release, I could "trap" my party in this cave where time does not pass and turn them into a party so powerfully prepared that a great portion of their adventure would be not only conquer-ably but comfortably so. And I'm forced to ask: what does this mean?
Taken from the perspective of the actors, the dungeon is a space of compressed time. It seems like time progresses but according to the nominally objective time that's not the case. They are trapped in a perpetual present and any future that exists merely loops around to the moment they are in. It is a treadmill and there are existential implications. Let the clock tick a second more and they had snapped forward like a rubber band and find themselves. They are beyond time and while they have a limited number of potential activities, many of them are beneficial. Leveling has a variety of gains, acts of thievery can lead to stockpiles of restoratives, and infinite time to explore means no risk of unfound items or secrets. And yet, something about the situation feels wrong.
I'm ultimately not interested (at least for the moment) in ascribing any sort of ethical judgement to this state of affairs but there is a sort of curious interaction happening between player and actor under these circumstances. The character are being nurtured and developed and grow in objectively beneficial ways. but they are also prisoners removed from the ability to achieve any of their actual goals. There is a misalignment.
It's possible that this is the nature of any exploit or cheat. That they constitute, much like moving out of bounds might, a breaching of trust even if they result in benefit to the characters. These thoughts are fanciful but they are not uninteresting or absurd to consider. It's possible to look at this as a quirk of code and nothing else but that removes color from the situation that helps explore a player's effect on the world.
I don't know how long these travelers will remain in this timeless bottle. I only know that they can't leave, and time can't move, until I decide that it can.