I hate the way people tiptoe around indie games in general.  The industry’s approach to the vast majority of these shittastic independent game developers wreaks of a mother telling her daughter that she has a “nice” singing voice, only to have the daughter try out for American Idol later in life and get publicly destroyed by Simon Cowell.  I tell you this so you can be sure that when I tell you Time Gentlemen, Please is one of the best adventure games I’ve played in a very long time, you’ll know I’m serious.

Time Gentlemen, Please is an oldschool comedy adventure game, complete with side-scroller action and pointless puzzles (I wouldn’t have it any other way, for the record).  Before I decided to dig into the old wallet and drop the budget-breaking $5 on the full game, I made it a point to check out the demo.  It’s pretty much what you’d expect from a demo — you play through the first level and only see enough to whet your palette (which worked quite well on me).  As someone who notices the “little things” in games, I was very amused to see the characters (Ben and Dan) allude to and make jokes about my playing a demo.  There was a point near the end of the demo where you have to do something that almost injures Dan and they talk about how you should remember NOT to do that in the actual game.  What can I say, I’m amused by the little things.

You’ll quickly find yourself traveling through time and exploring the world of paradoxes and dinosaur Nazis.  You’ll prevent friends from getting “shot in the cock” and you’ll turn guns into rubber chickens through the magic of your super phallic time-wand thingy.  You’ll stare Hitler in the face and call him SHITler, then make fun of yourself for making such a stupid pun.  In the end, you will become one with your maker.  It’s a story about beginnings, ends, sexing, and getting shot in the cock.

The difficulty is fairly good for a large portion of the game, allowing most people to solve the puzzles without cheating and still feeling good about accomplishing something.  There are some points that will require you to (1) be very lucky; (2) be very, very lucky; or (3) cheat.  Still the majority of the puzzles are well done, and the writers manage to poke fun at themselves quite a bit about making you jump through so many hoops to accomplish a relatively simplistic task.

Another “little things” note:  many adventure games cop out by regurgitating the generic “you can’t combine those” line whenever you try to put two incompatible items together.  Time Gentlemen, Please goes to the opposite extreme and often has numerous comments and entire conversations waiting for you when you try to combine incompatible items.  There are even a few occasions where it looks like it’s going to work, and then when it doesn’t work they say something to the effect of, “Wow.  I really thought that was going to work.  I did the animation and everything!”  These little details really help to set the game apart from the competition.

In the end, if you don’t spend your Friday nights alone sniffing glue mixed with your own farts, you will like this game.  It may even be enjoyable for some glue sniffers — I can’t say for sure.  What I can say for sure though is that if you enjoy witty dialogue either in or out of games, you’ll probably have a great time playing through Time Gentlemen, Please.  And really, for $5, just go buy the damn game and support these awesome developers.

I should also mention that I played the entire game using CrossOver: Games on my Macbook Pro with absolutely no problem.  You can buy Time Gentlemen, Please here.

Tags: adventure game, comedy, game review, indie adventure game, indie game, review, side-scroller, tgp, time gentlemen please, time gentlemen please review, time please gentlemen, video game review