Pushing My Buttons
HIGH Seeing a set of perfectly synchronized clones all working together.
LOW So many buttons!
WTF For real though, why are there so many buttons?
If I’ve learned one thing from consuming nearly four decades worth of science-fiction, it’s that I want absolutely nothing to do with the space-time continuum.
Causal Loop, a first-person puzzler, only reinforces this conviction by putting players in the shoes of Bale, an interplanetary archaeologist who, along with his partner Jen and fussy AI Walter, are investigating an ancient signal on the desolate planet of Tor Ulsat. Within minutes of making landfall, Bale mucks about with inscrutable alien technology, shatters the timeline into countless possible futures while losing Jen in the process, and condemns himself to a seemingly-endless litany of puzzle-laden labyrinths.
It’s an inauspicious start to say the least.
The late inhabitants of Ulsat Tor were apparently big on two things – buttons and cooperation. For, on this planet, even the most straightforward task requires multiple buttons to be pressed simultaneously, often frustratingly located on opposite sides of an area. This requires a solo operator like Bale to be in at least two places at once just to open a simple door.Â
Conveniently, as a knock-on effect of the fractured timeline, Bale can now create looping clones of himself within the world. These “echoes” can only be created in certain spots within stages, allowing players to record themselves running through a level while performing simple tasks… such as pressing a button. Once a loop is complete, the player’s echo will repeat these steps ad nauseam.Â
While multiple clones can be created, they cannot occupy the same space, and their paths can never cross, requiring careful planning and synchronicity. By the end of his adventure, Bale can create up to three of these echoes, each carving their own cyclical path through the stages. This skill proves invaluable as Bale, now fused with his AI companion, battles against the broken timeline, and an evil, fractured version of himself, in search of his lost partner.
As the complexity of Causal Loop’s stages increases, new obstacles such as force fields that block player’s paths, teleporters leading to parts unknown, and keys that must be slotted into nodes to power up machinery are introduced. Each of these operates under its own set of rules – keys, for example, cannot be handled by cloned echoes, and can only be carried by the player directly. Each level revolves around combining these elements to clear a path for the player’s echoes to press buttons that open doors and activate light bridges, allowing players to reach the exit.Â
At its best, Causal Loop is an exercise in clockwork precision – it’s a slow tweaking of the echoes’ timing to ensure a force field drops at just the right time, and that three buttons are pressed by three separate versions of Bale at the exact right moment to open a door. There is an algebraic quality to it all, and I began following a kind of temporal PEMDAS as I tried to suss out the correct order of operations to unlock each stage.
Progress is made by inches in Causal Loop, and as I whittled my way towards the solution to each stage’s equation, I often found myself waiting for moments of inspiration that never came, and the inherent appeal of creating looping echoes began to fade as I realized that all I was doing was creating a cycle of synchronized button presses. There’s never a sense of evolution in Causal Loop’s mechanics, and its rising complexity ends up feeling more like convolution as the number of buttons increases.
The maze-like level design only exacerbates this feeling as I stumbled into stage after stage full of dozens of buttons, multiple sets corresponding to multiple doors, and frequently I had to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out which button did what. Often, these elements are not within eyesight of one another, and there were many times I pressed a button without being sure what the outcome was, creating a frustrating process of trial and error.Â
Looking at other aspects of the experience, while Causal Loop’s aesthetics are cleanly presented, they lack a sense of identity. Its black and neon tech corridors and anonymous, rocky canyons only compounded my frustration as I struggled to orient myself within increasingly-large stages.
All of this is at odds with slickly produced, propulsive narrative segments. There is an abundance of dialogue and cutscenes for what feels like an austere exercise in puzzle-solving, and I had trouble reckoning those disparate elements. As Causal Loop tried to draw me into the increasingly warm relationship between the headstrong Bale and his persnickety AI, Walter, I was simultaneously repelled by the dry, mechanical tasks I was asked to perform.
Causal Loop is a tale of extremes – on the one hand, I admire the intricacy of its machine, creating perfectly choreographed loops to achieve a common goal. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but be disappointed by the repetitive nature of that goal. There’s a polish to the presentation and play of Causal Loop, but the concept itself feels underdeveloped, and the stages feel like wireframe prototypes. Despite the inherent appeal of looping clones, I ultimately came away wishing for a more exciting application than just pressing buttons.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Buy Causal Loop – PC – PS – Xbox
Disclosures: This game is developed by Mirebound Interactive and published by Headup Games. It is currently available on PC, PS5, and XBX/S. This copy of the game was obtained via Publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Fantasy Violence, and Language. There is no direct combat in this game, and most action is presented in cutscenes or off-screen. There player will find the corpses of their previous iterations in the broken timeline, and there are text descriptions of how they were killed. There is no blood or gore to speak of, and the limited violence is generally presented abstractly. Profanity is used commonly through the narrative with characters using most four-letter words.
Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present with presets for Deuteranopia, Protanopia, and Tritanopia. There are also options to further customize the color palette if the presets do not offer sufficient flexibility.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles, and these subtitles can be both altered and resized. There are 12 different font size presets, the option to add a background to the subtitles, and the option to change subtitle language and audio language independently. All audio cues have on-screen visual components. While the majority of the dialogue is properly subtitled, there are certain scenes in which whispered, ambient dialogue is not subtitled. This dialogue is not inconsequential, and these scenes are used to illustrate the breaking down of the timeline in the narrative. For this reason, this game is not fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: Certain functions are remappable. All inputs can be remapped with the exception of movement being bound to the left thumb-stick and look being mapped to the right thumb-stick.
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