u/Velocity_LP

▲ 8 r/tenet

A "Return of the Obra Dinn" style game might be one of the few ways to incorporate inversion into a video game without compromising its logic/physics

Obviously we can't ever have true, full inversion as portrayed in the film in a video game where you can influence/participate in the bitemporal timeline, since that would literally require violating causality. Like, any subsequent runs you make through a timeline would look different from how they looked on your first run through, because the game didn't know what you'd do in your future. But you could use inversion in a "Return of the Obra Dinn" style game, where you aren't influencing the timeline yourself, instead you're observing different points in the timeline and trying to deduce what happened. An inversion detective. You look at different frozen snapshots of time and cross-reference the positions of objects and people and try to deduce what's going on and where all the objects and people end up, which direction they're temporally moving, etc. Unsure if it'd be better to have the specific times of each scene be explicitly portrayed to the player (e.g. you know the scene you're looking at occurred on date X time Y etc), or if it'd be better to have the player not know at what point in time each scene occurs and instead they have to infer the linear order based on the interactions of objects and characters across those scenes.

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u/Velocity_LP — 3 days ago