CLOSING THE LOOP

What can you achieve within 25 seconds, really? In multiplayer shooter terms, it might be long enough to land a couple of headshots or (more often, at least in our case) to sprint from a spawn point, trying to rejoin the action before it moves on. In Lemnis Gate, though, 25 seconds is the length of an entire round, the duration of your character’s entire existence. Fortunately, you get more than one shot at it.

Once the countdown hits zero, you simply pick a different character class – ‘operatives’, in Lemnis Gate’s parlance – and play out those same seconds from a fresh perspective. And again, and again, your new actions layered atop everything you did before until there’s a full team of five fighting side by side, all controlled by a single player. So, yes, it’s another example of this season’s must-have gaming accessory, the time loop. But to understand what makes Lemnis Gate such a joyously unusual experience, it’s probably more useful to think of it as a turn-based shooter.

There’s an extra step that needs to be inserted into the version of events above. At the end of each loop, before you start over with your next operative, play passes to your opponent. They study what you made of those 25 seconds, and try to think of a way to undo it. So, say you sent a scout to snatch an objective and run it back to base, scoring the first point of the match. Your opponent might counter with their sniper, catching the scout with a well-aimed headshot to wipe him – and that scored point – off the timeline before he can ever touch the objective. Or perhaps they sneak their engineer to your goal line, awaiting the scout’s return with a freshly planted crop of turrets.

, co-founder of Ratloop Games Canada and game director, likens it to chess: there’s a limited selection of pieces, with