“Let me start. I’m here in the house, I can see a desk, I can’t go anywhere else. So on the desk, there are two books about automatons, a couple of colourful stones, some tool that I’m going to describe as stoneholder, a larger stoneholder, a framed degree on the wall, and oh, I almost forgot, a white raven.”
“Oh, I had that before. You can click on it and then it flies away.”
“Nice.”
“All right. On my end, there is a cryptic letter I don’t really understand, and a couple of bells. Like, one for the kitchen, and for the study, and for the music room. There’s also a plant here, but I think it’s only for decoration.”
“That doesn’t really help with my stones…”
Tick Tock: A Tale for Two is a… well, the title says it all, it’s a tale for two with the central theme of time. It’s a short, atmospheric puzzle game that is explicitly made for two players. Not fewer, not more, exactly two, and games like this always make my heart beat faster! That’s the dream for a co-op enthusiast, too many games are basically single player with one person tagging along or not having any meaningful distinction between the players, or a multiplayer game, with the attitude of “I guess you can play me with only two players if you don’t have any friends”.
There is a story in Tick Tock, but it’s hidden and meta and communicated only through hints. I’m not going to spoil the story, partly because I don’t want to, and partly because I don’t fully understand it, but the words that come to mind are clocks, time, circle of life and death and everything, melancholy, nostalgia, existentialism. And trains.
The game has a very unique mechanism (at least I haven’t seen it before), you are playing together, but you don’t actually need to connect the two computers / tablets / whatever you are playing on. Both of you simply launch the game, discuss which one of you is going to choose Player 1 and Player 2, and then all you need is a way to communicate. So, if you are in the same household, this presumably means talking to each other. You are both playing the same story and the same general setup and environment, but you will see different set pieces. A very simplified example would be when one of you sees some symbols on a wall she has to rearrange, and the other player finds the solution written down in a book, so she tells the other player the correct order, the other player advances, and finds something with which they can help the first player’s upcoming puzzle. Most of the puzzles are built around this structure, one of you has the information, and needs to communicate it to the other player.
The Good
In case it was not obvious from my intro text, I absolutely loved the core mechanism of this game. It’s simple, elegant, satisfying.
The puzzles themselves are a bit easy, but despite that I quite often felt smart, and I do like that feeling. You easily get into the flow of the game, I could not imagine stopping before we finished, the feeling of opening another door / safe / clock / whatever, shouting “yess!” over and over again was just too much of a high.
I do like the atmosphere and the artwork, once again, it’s simple, elegant, satisfying. That seems to be a recurring theme of this review. The whole underlying sense of creeping melancholy, light philosophical notions of time and life and whatever – I can’t put my feelings into words, mainly because my feelings are not fully formed yet, but I do like it. The game has an almost Dark Souls-esque way of storytelling, you never get the full picture, only hints from old newspapers, whispers in the air, odd obstacles (why is there a barrel hanging on a rope?), but it was enough to make me feel intrigued, and I wanted to find out more and more about this world.
The game is also very accessible for non-gamers, the concepts are simple and easy to understand, you would be able to start playing Tick Tock with someone who has never played anything before.
The Bad
Unfortunately, the game is way too short, it ended much sooner than I expected. I played other similar very quick two-player games, We Were Here comes to mind, but in that game, I did not feel rushed, the story and the set was more defined. Tick Tock to me felt like it ended at the point where the developers figured this would constitute as a viable product, and nobody could complain. Don’t get me wrong, the game does come to an endpoint, with an actually very interesting meta-comment, but I feel like I could have used one or two more… khm… periods.
Needless to say, the game has zero replayability value, once you are done, that’s it. Unless you have a surprisingly bad memory of course. There’s also the thing that you haven’t even seen the full game yet, since you only played half of it, and already you can’t play it anymore.
The Co-Op
Co-op is there, you have to work together with the other player very closely, communicate, listen, etc. Plus points for making it so indirect and yet so intertwined in the actual gameplay.
The Recommendation
I loved every second of playing this game, but in hindsight, I don’t consider it to be great. It’s OK, a nice way to spend 1.5 hours, and if you do have a very close gaming partner, I can’t imagine you would not have fun with it. If you have ever went to an escape room, just the two of you, and you enjoyed it, I can safely recommend Tick Tock: A Tale for Two, because it’s a very similar feeling. Even if in the game you are not locked in a room, but merely in the inevitable passage of time.
Info
| Release Year | 2019 |
| Genre | Puzzle |
| Difficulty | Easy |
| Number of Players | 2 to 2 |
| Length | 92 minutes (the game will tell you exactly...) |
Rating
| Overall | Good |
| Story | Good |
| Co-Operation | Great |