- Pace82 · frantic
- Every one or two seconds a shot comes back and you have to be on your reflection when it lands. There's never a pause, and the reel keeps rewinding faster.
- Difficulty69 · rather merciless
- Three cracks per section, one for every missed shot or every time the debris crushes you. At three, the paradox sends you back to the start of the section; each stage has two.
- Tone70.9 · rather unsettling
- Everything is in negative, like film run backwards: wrecks stitching themselves up, a planet closing over its cracks, rumbles sucked back in. Little by little you understand you're undoing a war, and that the first blow was yours.
- Story21 · rather silent
- Not one line of story. A rewinding timecode and a few words to guide your hand the first time ("be where you were"); the rest is read in what rebuilds itself.
- Scale81.5 · cosmic
- From the first second, a planet split in two. Each stage pulls back and widens the frame: the moon, the fleet, then the sun itself shrinking back to life.
- Form35.5 · in between
- A shoot'em up you already know, with one reversal you see at once: time runs backwards, so you don't fire, you catch your shots. Not a hidden rule, an inverted world.
- Look95 · lush
- Thousands of shards, splinters and sparks flying back along their paths, wrecks stitching themselves together piece by piece, and film grain. Density is capped on old phones.
The theme
A space war played backwards, like film rewinding on the reel: the split planet and the wrecks, then the siege of the moon, the fleet, the sun we set ablaze, all the way back to the very first shot. That shot was yours. When it slides back into the barrel, the picture turns positive over a whole planet, and your ship leaves without firing.
The mechanics
Time runs backwards: you don't shoot, you catch your shots. Slide the ship (finger, mouse or arrow keys) onto your reflection before the ring closes, flee the circles where debris stitches itself back together, then follow trails, hold the tip of a beam, slip a firewave through its gap. Three cracks and the reel section starts over; two sections per stage.
Palette
Film negative: grainy bone #ece4d3, sepia ink #1b1512, rust shots #c2391b, verdigris ship and reflections #2f8f83, amber circles #e59a2b, bruise-violet shadows #5a3d6b, sprocket holes down the edges. On the last shot, the positive: night #0a1a3a, oceans #3a8fd0, land #6fbf6a, golden cities #ffcf5a. Syne and Martian Mono. Cold, grainy, breathless.
