I had a chance to sit down with Recur during Summer Game Fest and had a blast. This small team, named Kaleidoscube, has created a game where you play as a mailman who finds himself able to turn back time by walking left while turning time forward by walking right. The goal: to save the world from being torn apart by a company’s exploding factory.
As I began the demo, I was stopping a car from falling on the mailman’s head. I quickly figured out the vibe of the game and made my way through the city, solving puzzles to slowly fix damage before it happens. The puzzles aren’t insanely complex, but they’re a lot of fun and make you think about time differently as you keep going.
There isn’t much in the way of complexity to the controls. Mostly everything I did was moving and clicking A (on an Xbox controller) to interact with things. Your goal is to keep moving to try to save the world, or at least your town.
My favorite part of the demo was actually one of the moments that made me think the hardest. The goal was to gain a battery from inside a warehouse to power an elevator. Outside this warehouse was a group playing basketball. Using my rewind time ability, I moved the basketball goal to an angle that would be right, rewound, waited for the character to shoot, moved the basketball goal back to where it was, and moved right to allow the basketball itself to smash through the window. Once I did, I jumped in, snagged the battery, and rewound time to let not only the window not break, but the player made the basket in the end.
I finished the first demo pretty quickly, and the team let me play another demo further into the game, where you had to try and stop a train from smashing off the tracks, killing hundreds. This scene was a lot of fun and full of interesting puzzles meant to test your ability to play with time. As this was a big moment in the game, I won’t spoil how you end up fixing the train from crashing, but it was quite a thrilling experience!
The iconic level from Braid was an inspiration alongside games like Little Nightmares.
Animations were smooth, and I absolutely loved the style the team at Kaleidoscube went with for their timey wimey game! It’s cartoony in all the best ways, and while the game has some intense punishments if the puzzles aren’t solved (like taking out an entire street of people). However, the puzzles are meant for you to save the day as the mailman makes his way towards the factory to hopefully stop the explosion from ever happening.
I had a wonderful time with Recur and will be excited for its full release. You can wishlist the game now on Steam!
