Here's something utterly terrible. A technically clunky point-and-click adventure from the mid-90s, committing almost every conceivable sin of the point-and-click adventure genre, enhanced by the notion of it being an Eurojank adventure. Back in the day, European developers poured out a lot of adventure games, most of them low-budget and technically less than desirable. While they kept the genre alive for a long time, it was announced dead by the games press. It's hard to ignore that many of these games are horrible. The Time paradox carries this legacy.
The story, as better explained by the game manual, goes something like this: In the future, a council ruling over Earth and Time notices a problem. A member of the council, Morgana Le Fay (you might guess where this is going), got angry, threatened to destroy the past to change the future, and stole a time machine to do so. They get you, Kay, one of the time agents (or a traveller), to get after her to fix the history.
Instead of ending in Arthurian times, Kay ends up in prehistory. There, you need to run around and encounter anachronisms until you find a time machine you need to destroy. After this, a time portal jump finally takes Kay to the Middle Ages, where she needs to solve a couple of puzzles, find Morgana, and take care of her. Then she wakes up Merlin, with whom they go to the super secret time room, where Merlin zaps Morgana, and Kay can take a time machine ride back home. And that's that.
First off, there's no dying in the game. This is an extremely good thing, thanks to the terrible navigation and hotspot systems in the game. When you click around the screen, you can't be sure if Kay actually starts walking or if you are hitting a hotspot that isn't triggering correctly. And it's at times very hard to tell where the scene exits are. Before I finally resorted to a walkthrough, I had been walking past a screen exit several times and had just not managed to get the correct part of the screen under the mouse. And even if you know where the exit should be, it's still possible to swing past it a couple of times before you manage to find it.
Then there's finding all the stuff you need during your adventure. While a good deal of it is just your standard pixel hunting mixed with using the right item in the right place, at one point, you walk into a seemingly empty scene. The scene in question has two very important items, but you can't see them, nor is there a hotspot for either of them. You find the items by just walking on two different spots at the left edge of the screen. If you just enter the room and move the mouse around, there are no hotspots or anything that would prompt you to actually walk on either of those spots.
The navigation is a problem as well. Very often, Kay moves to the wrong place when you try to hit a specific spot. Or the wrong hotspot is activated, at least in prehistory. This does get a bit better in the medieval era, but that's also because the scene layouts are easier to read. There's a lot of padding and empty rooms, though. Some are obvious red herrings, but some might be remnants of a longer game that got axed at some point in development.
The UI is perhaps the most interesting part of the game. You can easily hide the verb menu by right-clicking on the screen and then opening it on either the top or bottom part of the screen, depending on whether you need more visibility on either part. The use and give menus open up the inventory, each with the relevant operation activated. Technically, it's perhaps the most functional aspect of the game.
In the prehistoric era of the game, Kay is wearing a relatively revealing attire of thongs, knee-high boots, and a tight top. Often, when she's picking up stuff, she turns her back to the screen and bends forward, basically mooning at the player. I suppose that's supposed to be cheeky, but it does get old very quickly. In the Middle Ages, she changed into a dress, but even that had an open bust area. That said, her walk cycle with the dress is actually the best piece of animation in the game.
Other than that, the animation is very sparse. Many of the characters you meet are more or less static or have very simplistic animations. Also, some of the characters look like they were meant for an entirely different kind of game. The background art would have been decent in the early 90s, but by 1996, the game was clearly lagging behind in terms of art; by the mid-90s, a resolution of 320x200 was already behind, even in DOS.
As you'd expect from a mid-90s game, Time Paradox is voice-acted almost completely. I say almost, as, for some reason, the version I played did not have voices in the intro or final cut scenes. During those, all you see are subtitles, even though there is music. Then again, the voice acting isn't anything to write home about, so its existence is not here, not there.
Time Paradox is one of those titles that is not sold anywhere. Nothing is lost there. But those who want it will find it if they look for it.
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