The intro cutscene is spectacular.
The time control mechanic is interesting, as you need to land on the upcoming side of the cog to slow down time, and land on the lowering half of the cog to speed it up. This makes logical sense but feels clunky and can lead to frustration:
- if you wanted to speed up time, you will need to land on the gear half that's rotating downward. This becomes a problem when you jump onto a gear that is the last in the chain, as you end up causing the gears to speed up and being rotated off of the gear and fall downwards. This can cause you to land on another gear half that's rotating downward, which speeds things up even further and sends you plummeting downward further. There was also an instance where a fast moving gear was pushing me into a wall - the gear was rotating so fast that the game was not registering me on solid ground most of the time, so I was not allowed to jump. I had to resort to frantically mashing the jump button and hope that the game was registering me on solid ground at that instance in order to escape.
- if you wanted to slow down time, you do the opposite and land on the gear half that's rotating upwards. This compounds with the earlier problem as you tend to jump up to higher elevated or larger gears, so you're more likely to trigger a slowdown. This is fine unless you needed time to be moving faster to make certain jumps, in which case you need to jump on the downward rotating half to speed things up. However, now you need to go back on the other gear half to gain some space for a runup, which then triggers a slowdown, leading to a tedious cycle of jumping between halves to get the desired speed. There is a deadzone where neither is triggered, but depending on the gears size and whether you're sped up or slowed down, landing in the deadzone and getting the needed runup becomes difficult.
A possible way to alleviate this would be to allow only certain gear types to have time manipulation properties instead of all of them. This would give the player a finer degree of control with the mechanic and allow for more consistency when platforming. I do like that the rate of time flow factors into the platforming aspects, such as making larger jumps for sped up time, and using slowed down time for easier platforming segments. It makes the game more challenging as you need to think about the time flow.
All of the moving cogs and mechanisms makes it look nice as you navigate through the tower. It's a little dark, so it was difficult to see and time jumps on some of the darker mechanisms, like the pistons that come out of the walls, and the loose gears. The instructions that are scrawled on the gears were helpful and well placed.
Overall, the game has an interesting way of including a time manipulation mechanic through its platforming. It just requires more refinement in where the mechanic should be placed.