Round and Round We Spin: Do Time Loop Video Games Suggest a Clearer View of Reality?

How does fiction connect to our society? In this piece, Jon Stone explores how time loops can offer a framework for understanding reality and addressing ideological conflicts by experiencing multiple, interconnected perspectives. 

by Jon Stone, poet and lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University

11. marts 2025 · 7 minute read

Who doesn’t love a good time loop story? Typically, they involve events over a set period of time being recounted repeatedly with minor variations. These variations are usually caused by the actions of a protagonist who is attempting to escape the time loop. After all, who doesn’t love a good time loop story? Typically, they involve events over a set period of time being recounted over and over, but with increasingly dramatic variations, often as a result of the story’s protagonist trying to break the loop. After all, who doesn’t love a good time loop story? Typically – you get the idea.

It’s only in the last decade, however, that we’ve seen the emergence of the time loop video game as a popular genre. Why so late to the party? As a narrative device, the time loop is so well suited to video games that one could be forgiven for thinking it originated in them. It didn’t, of course; P. D. Ouspensky’s Strange Life of Ivan Osokin preceded the first commercial electronic game by more than half a century, and Harold Ramis’ 1993 film Groundhog Day remains the most famous example of the genre.

And yet, much more so than literary fiction and films, games are designed with repeated – sometimes endless – play in mind. While a traditional, non-interactive narrative is delivered at an even pace, one page/sentence/word/reel/frame at a time, the stories told by games tend to involve a lot of stopping, reversing and restarting. Their middle and ending portions are nearly always inaccessible until the player has accomplished certain feats, and these feats usually – though not always – involve reliving the same simulated events over and over in order to learn an optimal sequence of reactive measures and thereby avert the player avatar’s death.

One might reasonably infer, therefore, that the time loop had been invented as an ingenious solution to the problem of video games jolting players out of their stories whenever the protagonist – their avatar – anticlimactically snuffs it. Instead of having the player artificially retread the same story beats, like someone who’s lost their place in a book, a time loop game follows the lives of one or more characters who are themselves trapped in a temporal circuit. Certain events and interactions recur, but it is the protagonist/s – not just the player – who negotiates encounters differently with each visit, and in so doing learns more about the world and their place in it. Supposing, then, that such unlikely scenarios are not just brain-taxing hypotheticals, but actually have something to tell us about ourselves.  

There is a modest amount of variation in the way time loops can be implemented, both as narrative device and gameplay mechanic. In Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019), a space exploration game set within a small solar system, the entire game is seemingly reset – after just 22 minutes of gameplay – by the local sun going supernova. Every living thing in the universe perishes, except, of course, the avatar of the player, who is instead flung backwards in time, to a point just before they boarded their rinky-dink rocket.

Now armed with the knowledge that they have 22 minutes to act before the sun dies, their most urgent dilemma is how to stop it. Since so much changes over the course of that short span of time – the relative positions of the planets and their moons, the thickness of a comet’s frozen crust as it approaches the sun, the structural integrity of a world falling into a black hole – the only way to explore every possible location is to take full advantage of the loop. Each time it restarts, the player jets off to a different ball of rock, gas or ice, and every time they suit up and set down their ship they head in a different direction. For the first couple of dozen loops, that is – before they begin figuring out the order of things. By the end of the game, player and protagonist are aware of everything that’s occurring in every part of the solar system at any given point, as well as how this came to be – a process that involves piecing together the story of another race who lived millions of years previously. Only once this knowledge has been accumulated and put to practical use can the protagonist finally escape and the player reach the real ending of the game.

What’s interesting about all three is the way they impose the idea of one person’s (or one duck’s) experience as, simultaneously, a single continuous thread and a matrix of possibilities.

Pocket Watch by Sokpop Collective (2020) operates in a similar fashion. In this tiny adventure, designed to be completed in a matter of hours, an erupting volcano swallows an island community after what seems a mere few minutes of poking around and chatting to people. Time in the game is accelerated, however; those few minutes correspond to a day’s work for the islanders, as indicated by the rapidly deepening colour of the sunset and shifting tide. If the player (in the role of a cartoon duck) is able to find enough coins to win the titular pocket watch at auction, they gain the power to reset the clock, in the process transporting themselves back to their hut on an even smaller island just off the coast of the main one.

As well as granting them the power to choose when to restart, and to do this as often as they like, the watch allows them to take objects back with them. Their first obstacle is removed by finding boat-repair tools on the bigger island, then returning with these to the beginning of the day and fixing up their boat, so they no longer have to wait for the tide to draw back before setting out. Eventually, they gain a complete enough knowledge of the rest of the island – and, crucially, collect enough powerful artefacts – to intervene in the fatal series of events that provoke the volcano.

In the case of The Forgotten City, (Modern Storyteller, 2021) the protagonist (again, unnamed) discovers the body of another time traveller near the start of the game, and is told outright that his predecessor was trapped in the same time loop till they died naturally of old age. A warning, and a reminder that despite a great deal of repetition, the rest of the game is one gradually unfolding story. As in Pocket Watch, the protagonist is granted the power to take objects back in time with him, and thereby rapidly acquire riches through repeated theft of the same merchant’s money. Not that this does him much good – the city contains only 24 other human beings, is cut off from the rest of the world, and any number of possible events trigger its doom in the form of an army of living statues slaughtering the citizenry. Whenever this happens, the local magistrate opens a portal to the recent past for the protagonist to jump through. The goal is to find out how to influence the actions of nearly every other character in the game – since it turns out most play some part or other in breaking ‘the Golden Rule’, a magical pact that keeps them safe from the statues’ retribution. With every loop, the player and protagonist become quicker at solving people’s problems and saving them from themselves, to the point where they take on the role of a quasi-messianic figure. Ultimately, however, they must confront the architect of the whole bizarre scenario and challenge its purpose.

There are obvious commonalities between these titles, but in tone, genre and atmosphere they are distinct: a haunting and tragic space opera; a charming, animal-themed scavenger hunt; a pseudo-historical fantasy drama. What’s interesting about all three is the way they impose the idea of one person’s (or one duck’s) experience as, simultaneously, a single continuous thread and a matrix of possibilities – something which can only reach a conclusion when the same set of circumstances is played out in a variety of different ways. The closest equivalent to this in non-interactive fiction is, surprisingly, not time loop movies – these are usually either a cinematisation of one or other kind of hellish monotony, or a meditation on human agency, or a treatise on use and misuse of power. Groundhog Day itself is really just about learning to reconnect with people and escape one’s own insufferable ego.

The resurgence of chest-thumping nationalism, for instance, has its roots in a desire to be part of a superficially attractive kind of story – a story of conquering and cohesion.

No; we’re better thinking in terms of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and the similar fictional works it has inspired. The point of such stories is superficially that people – or rather, their memories – should not be trusted, that our recollections of events are ever tainted by personal bias. A deeper reading, however, is that reality is not ever adequately represented as a linear chain of causality, and in every attempt to do so we omit much that is crucial to making sense of our circumstances. Concurrent subjective impressions need to be gathered and set alongside one another in order to begin any serious study of a problem and persuade ourselves of a meaningful course of action. Multiple unreliable narrators are one way of illustrating this; looping, dynamic puzzle arenas are another.

It would be a stretch to attribute the recent popularity of these games to a dim but growing awareness that other kinds of story and game are no longer up to the job of generating insight. After all, it’s not as if they’ve superseded these other forms. I suggest, nevertheless, that they offer us the beginnings of an answer to a pressing existential issue. We might call the problem “What kind of story am I in?” It animates some of the most ferocious and unproductive ideological conflicts of our day. The resurgence of chest-thumping nationalism, for instance, has its roots in a desire to be part of a superficially attractive kind of story – a story of conquering and cohesion. This story is obviously incompatible with those that tell of the value of multiculturalism and diversity. Nobody, it seems, has a story to sell which has room for all to play a meaningful role, and those left out of the dominant narratives of our time end up vulnerable to psychological anxiety and the lure of demagogues.

It’s surely sensible, then, to look beyond linear stories as a way of framing reality – to start the process of re-envisaging ourselves as fluctuating nodes, each groping their way through many iterations of the present. In each iteration, we play a different part – where one doesn’t work, we can try another, and another. You could call it a way of thinking in four dimensions – something like that. And if it sounds glib to suggest that video games about space, volcanoes and animated statues are an appropriate place to begin that process, we must remember that all innovation, private or otherwise, begins in play.

The author recommends:

Cavalier Game Studios (2017): The Sexy Brutale.

Devolver Digital (2018): Minit

NomnomNami (2021): Bad End Theatre