A lot of games want you to admire them. Take your time, absorb the sights, let yourself be immersed. It’s nice to see the detail put into all these fictional worlds. It helps to make them feel lived in. But for some games, having the freedom to run around willy-nilly without any semblance of time doesn’t always make sense.
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Some games want you to be confined by their rules, too. If the world is under threat, it doesn’t really make sense that you’re spending weeks in-game but leisurely traveling around. Time limits like this help with the urgency of the world, and make it so you have to actually plan what you’re dong at any given moment. And these games are some of the best at it.
10
Crusader Kings 3
While perhaps slightly stretching the definition, Crusader Kings 3 absolutely has a time limit. With the game set within the middle ages of Europe, there is only so far that you can stretch that definition before it no longer makes sense. And the game’s method of getting around that is by simply ending the game once you get far enough.
This means you have a limit of just a few hundred years to accomplish all that you wish to accomplish. That can take quite a long time, but then even a single poor succession can have your whole empire crumbling down. Those centuries will start to seem very short when you have to repair all those broken borders.
9
Fallout 1
The original Fallout grew into a series that has changed quite a bit from its original incarnation. Starting as a top-down game with a mix of real-time and turn-based combat, the original Fallout also put a few more restrictions on you. Namely, in a rather specific time limit. Your vault needs water before it runs out.
It wouldn’t make sense to have infinite time in a scenario like that, and so you have a limit of just 100 in-game days. This is a fairly generous limit, but it does mean you can’t go too off-track if you want to avoid hitting a premature end. After you return the water chip to your vault, you have a new limit – 13 years. You’re much less likely to ever hit that one.
8
Unsighted
Unsighted is a mix between top-down combat game, and a platformer. It blends these styles wonderfully, giving a deep world with plenty of secrets to explore, and a combat system that makes you want to come back and keep trying new loadouts. That’s good, because you won’t have the time to see everything in a single run.
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In Unsighted, the whole world is on a time limit, and your character isn’t excluded from that. As time passes, characters will start to fade away until they are gone entirely. Certain items can extend their lives, but you’ll never be able to save everyone, and see all they can offer you. It’s a tragic experience, but one that forces you to prioritise the very people you interact with.
7
This War Of Mine
This War Of Mine is a painful game. More than just a game you play for enjoyment, it is a showcase of just how cruel war is. By day, you must manage your shelter and everyone in it, and by night you must scavenge and hope you survive to see another day.
The game is a bit of an inversion of the time limit. Rather than beating the game before the end, you must survive all the way until a ceasefire is announced. And that ceasefire isn’t a surefire thing, either. It will occur, eventually. And you just have to keep surviving until then.
6
Pathologic
Pathologic has gone through many different versions. In fact, even its very sequels are in a form a remake of the original. And to that end, each game holds that same core basis – there is a lethal sickness spreading through this town, and it will be burned to the ground in just a few days unless you can find a cure.
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To match this harsh reality, Pathologic is a cruel game to the player. The hardest difficulty is marked as its intended one, while the whole story cannot even be seen by a single character. Multiple playthroughs are needed to witness the reality of the town, but it might take a few more before you can even beat the harsh time limit.
Upon its release, XCOM 2 was known as an absurdly cruel game, to an almost comedic degree. A 90% hit rate felt more like 50/50, while enemies would all but defeat you in a single hit no matter what state they were in. The moment-to-moment combat was hard enough. But then came the time limits.
In XCOM 2, you have two major time limits to worry about. Within missions, some objectives can be completed but these are automatically failed after a few turns. Even more critically is the Avatar Program that the aliens are building. While you can sabotage it, you will have to defeat their stronghhold before completion, or else it’s an automatic game over.
4
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13
The greatest strength of Final Fantasy is how much it can change between every entry. None are quite like what came before, and that is true even of direct sequels. Lightning Returns is the third entry of the Lightning trilogy, and a rather unique one at that. Implementing the closest to real-time combat the series had seen thus far, it also had a new enemy.
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The very concept of time. The world is ending, and Lighting only has a limited amount of time before it is consumed entirely. As time advances, more of the world is removed from access, and its enemies and quests with it. Take too long, and the whole world is taken, and Lightning with it. At that point, your only choice is to start all over again.
3
Dead Rising
Dead Rising is one of the greatest examples of a time limit in games. The world is being overrun by a zombie virus, and it is down to the journalist Frank West to bring it to light. But he only has 72 in-game hours to do that. And even if you fail, the game makes you live with that.
Frank must complete case files to advance the game, though these can be failed. And fail enough of them, your mission is done. But the game forces you to keep going to witness the end of the world. While the time limit isn’t the harshest by any means, it puts an urgency in you that makes you liable to make mistakes. And it’s those mistakes that will be your real undoing.
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Majora’s Mask
One of the very first Zelda games to act as a direct sequel to the game that came before it, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask introduces its own twist on the time limit in a rather unique time loop. This is a unique twist, as it allows Majora’s Mask to be both incredibly long and short all at once.
You have three days to stop the moon destroying Termina. Except you have no chance of doing that. Instead, you need to learn the ability to turn back time so Link can learn how to stop it, and manipulate the days he can do it on. You learn more, get to keep key items, but otherwise have to start over each day, and only Link remembers.
That said, if you do fail to rewind time by the end of the third day, the moon will crash into Termina and you will have to start all over again.
1
Persona
Atlus has made a strong name for them with its many games, though the Persona games have given the studio an incredibly amount of fame. Persona 3 is when the series truly came into its own as something separate from Shin Megami Tensei, and the calendar system is one of the most important aspects of that.
Knowing exactly when you have to complete your next objective might seem helpful, but it suddenly puts you under pressure as to what you can actually do. Should you spend time with friends, or increase your stats? Maybe you should explore a dungeon to learn your way around. Suddendly, the number of choices becomes overwhelming.
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