Game Reviews

Time Geeks & Friends

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Time Geeks & Friends

Trying to find something in a hurry is never an enjoyable experience. Unless, that is, you're playing Time Geeks & Friends, which turns the agony of trying to find things into an ecstatic, asynchronous riot of colour and pop culture references.

Funny and irreverent, the game somehow manages to make looking for an American-football player in a town populated by clowns and giant Mario statues a thing of frantic beauty. This is Where's Wally for a digital age.

Finders keepers

The game has two modes. The first is Kids mode, which is a straightforward game of hide and seek. You get shown a picture of the person you're looking for and have an infinite amount of time to root them out of the scene you're presented with.

But it's in the second mode that the real meat of the game can be found. Here you're pitted against someone else in an asynchronous duel to see who can ferret out the right character in the shortest time.

What was sedate in Kids mode is made frantic by the inclusion of a ticking clock and a real-life adversary. Special perks can help you out, but you only get to choose one - the perk that extends your time is always the most tempting.

Excellent reference

The pixel-art style of the game sometimes means you'll be dawdling around, gawping at the wonderful, hilarious vignettes that Ivanovich Games has put together for you. I spotted Lost, The IT Crowd, and plenty of gaming references in my travels.

Finding a game with a stranger is a little difficult at the moment, but you can challenge your friends via Game Center and the usual social networks too.

Time Geeks & Friends is a gorgeous, often funny hidden object game. It's not revolutionary, but it's created with such lavish attention to detail that it's almost impossible not to fall in love with it.

A lack of content might spell an early downfall, but there are hundreds of little people to find, and hopefully hundreds of real-life people to share the task with.

Time Geeks & Friends

Beautifully well made and balanced, Time Geeks & Friends is a fine entry into the asynchronous multiplayer genre
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.