Quick Review: No Time To Explain Remastered

Just looking at the store page takes me back to the days of Flash and Newgrounds.

Made by tinyBuild and released to Steam on July 17th, 2015, No Time To Explain Remastered is… well… a remaster made in Unity of the original Flash game No Time To Explain, which was released to Newgrounds on January 6th, 2011. I haven’t played the original, but I guess I’ll trust the devs’ words that the remaster is better than the original. They say it themselves.

Yep - that's me down there, casually
taking down spaceships.

The story? Uh… well, to make it short, you, the player character, were dancing in your living room when a different you from the future breaks the wall and says that you must save the future and there’s, well, no time to explain. He then gets snatched by a giant crab’s claw and carried away, you grab the Jetpack Gun and give chase. Things are pretty straightforward from there – Ha! Wait, no, I mean it becomes a fucking weird knot of alternate timeline and universe shenanigans. The game’s progression itself is straightforward, though.

Are you sure it's not dangerous if I'm shooting
at my feet?

This is a platform game with slight puzzle elements. You move around with WASD, aim the gun with the mouse, and shoot with the Left mouse button. The gun can be used to shoot at stuff, obviously, but it’s so damn powerful that your protagonist, whose jumping talents are lacking to say the least, can shoot at the ground to be blasted to higher places. Hence the name Jetpack Gun. More and more gameplay elements get added over time, such as water that allows your character to jetpack even higher… or torches that set the character on fire in order to destroy obstacles.

Yep - that's me up there, casually visiting
spaceships.

Sometimes the character’s abilities will change. In alternate timelines, you may end up equipped with a shotgun with massive knockback and destruction power, or get flung around with a makeshift ability while you’re in a straightjacket. So props for changing gameplay now and then. One series of levels reminds me of INK, which – fair, that’s about the same level of difficulty in this darn game.

I don’t know what’s up with my selection for quick reviews, this year I’ve stumbled upon several meat grinder-style super-hard games in which you have infinite lives. Those games tend to be fairly short but compensate with a high difficulty. To be fair, I managed to finish the Story Mode of No Time to Explain Remastered, something I can’t say of every game reviewed so far, so I guess the difficulty is okay, albeit on the tough side.

Dead again? That's okay, I have
56884674349 lives left.

Wait, is this me, fighting an evil, fat version
of me, within myself, near my heart, over a
vat of acid?
Man, videogames, amirite?

The graphics remind me of the simple designs that were so common in Flash games of the olden days, though since this is a remade and improved version of one, it makes sense that the design would be such, with updates. The music is pretty great, being energetic and enjoyable. The story is… well, it’s basically parodying everything it can at every chance it gets, so don’t go look in there for stable time loops or any sort of sense. There’s no time to explain… because it’s all inexplicable. Not all the jokes land, but the sheer absurdity of the concept is taken advantage of fully and it’s to the game’s benefit. The controls take some time to get used to, requiring great precision that isn’t always easy to get since you need to coordinate the character’s movement with the keyboard to aiming and shooting the Jetpack Gun with the mouse, which makes a lot of levels a lot harder – but seeing the level design in later worlds, yeah, the controls couldn’t have worked any other way. I almost forgot to mention that the game also offers multiplayer in couch or Steam Remote play, so you may bring a buddy to face these challenges.

Pretty fun game, and I could actually tell tinyBuild liked to work on that and homage their own roots with an update. If you want to face its challenges, you can find it on Steam for 14.99$. If the price tag seems a bit high for what's offered, wait until there's a sale.