#timodd

STYLE (Gameplay, Graphics, Music)

TIMODD is an FMV investigative game. You are to talk to Dr Dekker’s patients and help them with their lives while also trying to find out who among them murdered Dr Dekker. The way you interview them is by typing questions through the text box seen in the above picture. Once you ask a question, a clip plays showing the patient to answer your question.

As more clips play, you hear more information, and you can ask more follow-up questions. The more you ask, the more information you get, but you also run the risk of becoming more insane, and as you soon discover, there’s more to these patients than meets the eye...

If you are having trouble with asking questions, you can type “Hint” on the text box and the game will give you a question that you can ask. Once you ask for a hint, you can’t ask for another for a certain amount of time.

You can also just play through the game by clicking the arrow down button on the text box and just ask the available questions it shows. There is no cooldown for this method.

Regarding the gameplay, I tried to formulate my own questions, but eventually I relied on the hint system to progress the narrative since there is no cooldown for that particular method. I feel like if it also introduced a cooldown, I would have relied on it less. I don’t know if it’s a weakness of the game mechanic or it’s just my own impatience working against me, haha.

Regarding graphics, well, it’s full FMV! I suppose one of my comments would be the surprising amount of people with bare feet.... a bit off-putting imo. Would you go to a doctor’s office with bare feet?

Music is apt for the narrative, creepy enough without taking away from the focus. Just blends in with the background. On the whole, the game has a solid style, but gameplay could be better.

SUBSTANCE (Story, Characters, Impact)

As I said in the previous section, TIMODD is an investigative game. You are a newly-hired psychiatrist that replaces Dr Dekker, recently murdered. You handle his previous patients. And what you know is that one of them is the murderer. You ask questions of these patients and try to help them as a psychiatrist should, but as time goes on, you discover some strange things about them... From here on out I will talk about some LIGHT SPOILERS, so be warned!

The patients themselves are interesting enough. One of them says he’s experiencing the same day over and over. Another says when the clock strikes midnight, time freezes for everyone except for him. You discover that all of your patients have some form of power or another... or do they? Are they actually powers, or just ramblings from their fraying sanity that you have to help them with?

I find the story middling and slightly interesting at best. The characters are decently acted too. What I’m slightly put off by is the framing of the story. You are a psychiatrist and you have to handle all of these mentally ill patients. I don’t know it’s just... to me, it feels like the game exoticizes mental illness in a strange way. I can’t quite put my finger on it really, it just seems off to me, personally. I talked to a friend about it and he made mention that this is just a quirk of Lovecraftian stories, where madness borne from experiencing the strange and monstrous is common. Nonetheless... this still feels a bit weird to me as someone who has a mental illness.

A quirk of the game is that sometimes, a clip would play out one way, but when you replay it with the in-game replaying mechanism, it doesn’t show it as you saw it originally. This makes for some interesting clips, but I think they didn’t leverage this to its full potential. I think they could have done more with it.

Also, I’m kinda annoyed that the two jumpscares they did weren’t even that scary. Surprising? Yes. But scary? Nope. I wish they upped the stakes more.

CONCLUSION

I wouldn’t consider TIMODD great, nor would I consider it terrible. It is an Okay experience. I tried to go for another playthrough to try and get achievements, but I found the thought of it to be a bit of a hassle. Nonetheless, it is a decent game for the price I bought it for. If you’re looking for an FMV game to dive into, I wouldn’t really write this off, but I do think there are better ones out there.