NOTE: This review was written for version 2.0 and may be outdated.
Lochronotran is a puzzle game based on the concept of going back in time to prevent events from occuring to achieve an otherwise impossible goal within 2 minutes. While the setup is a little convenient the resulting game is great fun to figure out and has several tokens to distract you from your real goal: stopping a nuclear bomb test from destroying the city you're in.

The past versions of the player and time travel are seamless. While most objects in the world do not interact with the player there are some notable exceptions, and the player CAN interact with several things. It's really exciting to see 100 little players scurrying around to do whatever it is you were doing several minutes ago. Around half of the game's puzzles involve working in tandem with past versions of yourself -- not nearly as difficult as it sounds and usually pretty obvious when you need to do it, which is one of my few complaints about this game.

Besides that, my other complaints are that it's almost too easy to teleport back in time. Maybe my space bar is simply overused but I found myself accidentally jumping back in time on several occasions. Another complaint is a not necessarily obvious bug -- the game stores ROBOT_IDs of several objects you can collect, but when a save game is reloaded, the objects get reassigned new IDs, causing some to respawn and others to disappear after reloading a save.

Despite these (fairly minor) complaints, I recommend this game if you love puzzle games. One star docked because it's so short... I'd love to see a full-length game like this or one with several more puzzles.

Lochronotran is an important game to me. I don't think it's a top tier MZX game, per se. I do think it's an amazing piece that straddles the line between what an MZX game should be, and what a game should be in general. It mixes new and old concepts in clever ways that just feel good.

Lochronotran encompasses a lot of the special quirks that I think make MegaZeux games unique. Things are slightly out of place; other things are generalized and glazed over; the small details are emphasized in strange places, and sometimes logic is thrown to the wayside altogether. There's a lot of incongruity between what is and isn't interactive, pertinent or thematic. A comedic element emerges as these slightly off-kilter things add together to give you the feeling that you're playing an old MZX game. It's a palpable nostalgia, the way that the elements unique to this medium and this genre echo their predecessors.

However, Lochronotran also illustrates a lot of the ways that MZX has grown up. The time travel reset system, while probably quite simple from a Robotic standpoint, is a very well executed special gimmick that takes the game's novelty to a great height. Special features and interactivity are treasured, but have grown up to become less of a solid-state ordeal. The time gimmick and the funny situational humor add together to create a sort of ethereal comedy, with vomiting noises and explosions abounding as your past selves go about their respective ways.

This game seems to take what we all love about MZX games--the slapstick humor--and extends them to another dimension by multiplying the interactivity and novelty of a game-changing gimmick.

The graphics, writing and sound aren't much to write home about, but they fit in the context and are the main reason this game is an excellent example of a concept, and not a excellent example in itself.

If this game was remade into a SE it'd have five stars--no doubt. And if a game was ever a deserving target of a "community makeover" -- it'd be this! I love it!

Great short game on the topic of time traveling and saving the day with only two minutes on the watch.

I can't add much more, otherwise I would spoil the player; the game flows impeccably, puzzles are logical, mechanics interesting. Play it now!