More details on Chronos Twins' time-travelling DS action
Look up for the present and down for the past
As avid sci-fi fans, there's nothing we at Power Gamer Towers like more when wiling away the long minutes when we're not playing games than a burst of Philip K. Dick or Alastair Reynolds. Time travelling for us should be a mere conceptual walk in the park, so we're pretty interested in EnjoyUP's Chronos Twins, which is the first game to use the DS' dual screens to enable you to play in both the past and present.
Still, the concept does sound a little complex to begin with.
"You only control one character but he is placed in two different states of time, present time [topscreen] and past time [bottomscreen]," explains EnjoyUp's MD Julio Moruno, helpfully.
One gameplay aspect of this set-up is that if one of your two time-stamped incarnations is standing on a platform, for example, the other one won't fall, even if he is standing on thin air. For this reason, a main feature of the game is modifying environments in the past so you can make progress in the present.
Moruno thinks players will quickly get to grips with the system. "We've created the game so everything is fairly intuitive," he explains.
"Chronos Twins has a gradual learning curve and the player acquires experience while he is progressing in the adventure. We've also spent time on balancing the game, so at no point or time will the player get stuck. There's a fine balance of puzzles and action too, which we believe will keep the momentum of the game moving at a nice pace."
On that note, the other main element of the game appears to be dealing with the sort of huge, imaginative bosses that have always dominated 2D platform games. Hopefully though, the time-travelling aspects of the game will mean defeating them is more interesting than just memorising their attack patterns.
Chronos Twins is due for release by Lexicon Entertainment in our future, Spring 2007, although it might be the past for Julio Moruno – who knows?
