Continue with Gamestar Plus
If good games are important to you.
Special reports, analyzes and backgrounds for role-playing heroes, hobby generators and single player fans-from experts who know what is played. Your advantages:
All articles, videos & podcasts from Gamestar
Free of banner and video advertising
Simply canceled online
Causal Loop. The title of this game sent me down into an endless rabbit hole when researching, from one Wikipedia page to the other. It was about time travel, paradoxes, parallel universes and physics. Now I have the feeling of understanding even less than before, so I prefer to tell you about the game behind this name.
We were able to look at gameplay from the sci-fi game exclusively and speak to the developers. Fortunately, this was significantly less confusing than understanding the concept of causal loop. And now I can tell you:If you are waiting for a new portal, then Causal Loop definitely take a look at!
Who am I and if so, how many?
Causal Loop is a sci-fi puzzle adventure in which we explore a foreign planet and the remains of alienzivilization. However, there is quite a chaos here, for which our main character Bale is responsible. When landing, he accidentally activates a machine that destroys the space-time continuum.
This leads to a lot of unpredictable consequences: Among other things, several versions of Bale are now running around on the planet, some of which have spent several decades there. At the same time, however, the central mechanics of Causal Loop is only possible:
We create short -lived copies of ourselves, so -called echoes, through which we take control. This is how we solve puzzles, for which there are actually several people. For example, we let one of our echoes open a door, while another flashes through and converted a switch that activates an elevator. Meanwhile, we go to the elevator and thus reach the next area.
The puzzles just start and first let us only control an echo that does simple tasks. Gradually, however, new mechanics and more complicated levels are introduced. In the last of the 15 chapters, we create up to three echoes and solve multi -layered puzzles that we probably would not have understood at the beginning.
Grips and skill
In order to overcome the obstacles that Causal Loop puts in our way, we not only have to think sharply and use what you have learned so far. Sometimes speed and skill also play a role. Echos only exist for a short time and we have to run and bounce in time to complete the puzzle - and do not fall into the corrosive liquid or abyss!
Many other mechanics are also limited in time. Some switches only open doors for a few seconds. Keys that activate a bridge, for example, are unstable and have to get to your base in time before exploding. This in turn also enables more creative solutions, in which we eliminate an obstacle with the explosion of a key.
We then provide the ultimate proof of our skills inBoss fights
. We can imagine them similarly to the fight against Glados in portal: With the help of our echoes and the puzzle mechanics, we trigger mechanisms that damage our opponent. We let one of the unstable keys fall down so that it explodes next to the boss.
Graphic splendor and story depth
The developers of Causal Loop would like to deliver a lot more than complex puzzle mechanics. The story and its presentation should be just as important. The developers do not yet reveal exactly how the story develops after the crash on the foreign planet. After all, several secrets also play a role:
Where is our colleague Jen? What do other versions of Bale plan? What happened to the alien civilization that used to live here? We also have to make decisions at certain points that lead us to different ends.
The story should be more thoughtful and dark and deal with philosophical questions such as your own identity, which is questioned by the existence of other Bales. From time to time, however, humor also loosens up the narrative, for example through the taunts between the impulsively Bale and his AI helper Walter.
In contrast to play like The Talos Principle, we don't have to smash the story ourselves. Instead, she is told about numerous dialogues and elaborately designed cutscenes. Developer Kai Moosmann emphasizes:Where we can do Hollywood, we also do Hollywood.
Thanks to Unreal Engine 5, such scenes and the gameplay themselves look really chic and impress with realistic lighting and sharp textures. Nevertheless, the developers strive to ensure that Causal Loop only places moderate requirements for your hardware. For example, they report that the current level of development also reaches 60 fps with an older graphics card such as the GTX 1080Ti on high graphics settings.
The planet that we explore is also quite barren and rocky: So you should not necessarily expect sparkling landscapes, but rather deserts, swamps and snow fields.
In the desert, the bleaching bones have long been extinct, huge creatures.
But for that we canAll dialogues in GermanHearing: Causal Loop is completely set to music in our language, with top -class speakers. Bale is spoken, for example, Björn Schelle, who already embodied V in Cyberpunk 2077. The AI Walter, on the other hand, sounds in the voice of Frank Schaff, who spoke the artificial intelligence of Jarvis and later superhero vision in the Marvel films.
When we can hear and see all of this is currently unclear:There is no fixed release date yet.However, it is already known that Causal Loop will only be available on the PC for the release, at Steam, Gog and the Epic Games Store. However, the developers do not yet confirm a possible porting on consoles.
