Bottom of the Bargain Bin: Time Ramesside (A New Reckoning)
Alright, Time Ramesside, enough is enough. You’ve sat on my shelf for too long, littered my YouTube list with terrible Let’s Plays, and ceased to die despite all logic and reason. In defiance of universal negative reviews, it still receives reworks, updates, revisions, and baffling complete overhauls. Someone out there is still spending labor hours on Time Ramesside (A New Reckoning). This needs to stop.
I wouldn’t even be mentioning Time Ramesside under normal circumstances. It’s a trash tier, waste of hard drive space that is perfect for Bottom of the Bargain Bin, but it’s also kind of old news. It’s been shit since it first came out, and has managed to hit every nadir of shit along its sordid history. Some people took a Trolls 2 kind of enjoyment in the absolute nonsense, which was perhaps the one shimmering sliver of polish amidst the massive unflushable turd.
Idk what he plans to do with that, but judging by his looks, he’s about to play a sick game of street hockey with a group of neglected street kids in a 90’s made for TV kids movie.
However, months after this fetid abomination was released as a “finished” title and left abandoned in a dumpster drowning in its own afterbirth, somehow the game has seen yet another complete overhaul. The menu has changed, the levels are new, and every single shred of enjoyable snarky fun to be had has been wrenched out like Dustin Hoffman’s teeth in Marathon Man. While before players could enjoy the quirkiness of the weapons, audaciously bright monster designs, inexplicably broken lag, and general goofiness, now all that is left is pain. It is the embodiment of a product with absolutely no redeeming values. It’s the Godwin’s law of games, spiraling ever more to being solely comparable to Hitler.
That’s a funny way to spell “Adolph Hitler”
I’ve never felt physically assaulted by a game, but Time Ramesside showed me that if someone really tries to make my life just a little bit objectively worse, it can be done in video game form. An epilepsy warning is common for a lot of video games, but somehow Time Ramesside is the first game whose combination of lights and noises managed to send my brain into a tailspin. After 10 minutes of the game, I felt the signs of a growing migraine, which for me are semi-epileptically triggered. At minute 15 when I got stuck, I ran to the dark living room, sat on the couch, threw up on my pants, and woke up in a haze 4 hours later. In a 3 A.M. cold sweat, I jumped into the shower, sat on the floor in a shivering heap, and wondered just who I could call to report the assault.
So, what does it play like? Well, the intro title, which I have lovingly titled “Greyscale Glare”, is a slow motion, black and white version of the level to come, with the bloom cranked up to a percentage that was not meant for mortal eyes. I’m sure that while making this level, whatever development kit they were using had a little paperclip pop up to say, “It looks like you’re about to permanently damage your customer’s retina. Would you like to try out a color distortion option that doesn’t result in a lawsuit?”
OH FUCKING CHRIST STOP
For the first real level, you run down a repeated prison hallway model while wantonly placed fire effects portray an apocalypse more visually offensive than my 85 year old grandfather witnessing Satan’s swaying magma dick in This is the End. You will run for a good dozen minutes before even getting to your first enemy, and there is absolutely nothing to see in any of the various cells, desks, lockers, nooks, or crannies. You pursue a creepy little girl—supposedly your daughter—who summons a bunch of zombies when you reach her. The zombies require exactly 6 bullets to kill, and if shot in their death animation will proceed to chase you like nothing happen until the game makes them pop out of existence a dozen seconds later.
If you manage to count your ammo and find one of the fabled extra clips that the developer promises are somewhere, then the little girl proceeds to just stand there and look at you while you try to interact with her. After you realize this is pointless, you just walk past her, and can either go left or right at a big hallway intersection. If you go right, you are wrong, and just wasted 5 minutes backtracking. If you go left, you are still wrong, because welcome to level two of Time Ramesside.
Actually getting the fire into the barrel was under the “advance” tab of whatever programming tutorial was used to slap this shit together.
Level two is better designed, in the sense that I’d rather my dick be swiftly chopped off than wrenched off by being bent back and forth repeatedly like a paperclip. Enemies are now stuck in walls, but all have the same “crawling writhe” animation, making it seem like they are doing impromptu phasic pilates. At least there’s ammo in this level, and you can generally find an extra clip at the corners of every room where a fight takes place. You also fight new bigger demon enemies, which take more bullets to kill but function identically to the zombies.
But damn, does my core look TIGHT!
After a bit of this, there was a visually distorted nighttime segment that gave me Vietnam flashbacks to the intro, and a really long staircase down. It leads to a sewer, which had a visual effect that might have been a good idea if toned down about 80%. As you go down through the same bit of repeated sewer, the camera becomes increasingly slanted. It’s similar to a bicycle, where shifting to turn tilts your horizon. It would be excellent in a “walking home from the bar after 12 shots” simulator, but just gets stupid here.
Doin’ sick power slides down the sewer where this shitlog belongs!
Trekking the long road to the far wobbly end of the booze sewer, I found the final door closed. I looked around for a few minutes for some kind of key, and could not find one. I shot the door, and noticed that it bled. Oh, cool, it’s like a demon door. I kept shooting to no avail. Then I shot the wall, and noticed that it bled too. I’d later restart the game, and see that doors and walls just bleed in Time Rammeside. Defeated, I turn around to see if I could find the key, and realize that the way they achieved this bizarre visual effect was by stretching the world in a way that doesn’t hold up to reverse scrutiny. I tried to walk back up the massive stretched ramp that led to the next layer, fell through the world, and called it a day.
You might call it poor programming, but I prefer to think it’s an artistic statement as to how even the game itself feels pain for being forced into this hellish existence.
I felt kind of bad leaving the game unfinished, until I realized that I made it farther than most. One of the top discussion topics was asking if the first level was actually beatable, which shows how much confidence consumers have in the title. The top discussed analyst on the Steam group also couldn’t get past the first level, but only because a game breaking bug made him warp into the wrong part of the next level. Some people, God only knows how, actually made it to the final level before the credits refused to roll. For most players, the greatest foe will not be the shambling corpses, but an unconquerable scripting error.
Do not buy Time Ramesside (The New Reckoning). Back when it was a pseudo-RPG with magic, fire spiders, and snow, it was worth maybe a dollar just to see all the fuss. The game has gone through several complete overhauls, but this one takes the cake. Not only did this game manage to get shittier throughout its Early Access process, but managed to be finalized into an even shittier product months after official release. I’m convinced that it’s now a performance art piece to figure out how to make a progressively shittier product, reverse engineering it to the state where it’s just an elaborate set of pencil drawings and notes in a 12 year old’s notebook. I’d rather burn the $10 this game costs, film it, get charged with destroying federal currency, and then take it all the way to the Supreme Court to prove that this should be considered protected speech as a form of protest.
Fuck you, Time Ramesside.
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Negative
Categorized:Editorials Horror Gaming Reviews
