Time Ducks: A Little Praise for a Little Game

The market for $1 mobile games is a humongous affair, a maze of shiny titles that all combat each other for the attention of the customer. Once a game is bought though, it’s oftentimes played maybe once or twice and then forgotten, abandoned until the next one that manages to grab the consumers’ attention comes around. It’s hard for any developer on iOS to grab sufficient attention for any game to be a true success story.

Of course, there still are success stories. Huge ones even. Just look at what kind of a dizzying juggernaut Angry Birds has become. All with ubiquitous merchandising and whatnot.

At the end of last year, there was another game that grabbed at least my attention. A crazy video appeared on all the major gaming outlets, featuring quirky music, charming pixel art and some weird messages displayed on the screen. It was based on this marketing video gone viral alone that I based my purchase of Time Ducks (Director’s Cut) on. And I have neither regretted the purchase nor abandoned the game since.

Time Ducks is really a charmer. The gameplay itself is a crude mixture of Frogger (animals crossing a street) with Braid (time manipulation, rewinding, speeding up) and some Match 3 thrown in for good measure. It’s really a fun game, but that’s not the main selling point. The game just has a ton of charm.

Of course there is pixel art reminiscent of the good old days. It’s colorful and cheery. Then there’s the music, which also speeds up and slows down when the time manipulation is used. To top it off, the game features really weird and silly achievements. Like Justin Bieber. And several tiers of llamas.

But beyond that, the game is more than the sum of its parts. I caught myself at the peak of the holiday AAA release deluge with several big releases to play - but not playing those because I wanted to chase a highscore in Time Ducks. Getting the animals across the road, mixing and matching llamas, bunnies, foxes, monkeys and ducks is a damn addictive affair. Just one more try to dethrone Werner Herzog—the top entry on the high score list—kept me from diving into “real games” for quite a few days. If there’s any endorsement to be had for this charming little gem, it’s this.