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Causal Loop is a mind-bending narrative puzzler where your past echoes help your present.
A
Alan Wen
You play as exo-archaeologist Bale who has journeyed to a long-forgotten alien planet to study its lost civilization, only to become accidentally trigger an almost-catastrophic event that's causing reality to fracture while you're trapped within a time paradox, or what you might also call a colossal causality loop.
Bale first needs to find his colleague Jen, an exo-linguist, although the demo begins with a ‘tastefully disguised tutorial’, so quips your floating AI companion Walter in a cheeky tap of the fourth wall. It acts as the quickest way to introduce how this causality loop has affected Bale, giving him the ability to make echoes of himself.
This ability proves useful from the get-go as I approach a terminal that opens a gate in front of me but only for a few seconds before it closes again. Fortunately, to the side of the room is a 'phase-rift', a kind of bubble I can step inside that then allows me to branch, effectively recording a version of myself performing an action, like walking up to activate the terminal.
Once recorded, this echo of Bale's simply performs the action on loop so I head over to the gate and wait for it to open and pass through it easily. Naturally, the puzzles get more complex after that. The recordings also have a short time limit, though you can also choose to end it earlier, so it's worth figuring out what your echo needs to do first before stepping into a phase-rift, though of course you can always re-record echoes too.
Walter is at least on hand within your suit to guide you on new puzzle mechanics, even if he's got a condescending tone about it. There's some terminals that need to be powered up by keys, which you also need to carry quickly as they are unstable and prone to exploding after a short while. But where things begin to get tricky is when I need to activate multiple terminals at the same time.
For this, Bale can create up to three more echoes of himself, and I start to think any more than that could result in brain melt. Each echo recording nonetheless requires its own phase-rift, while you also cannot have echoes overlapping each other's paths. On that note, you also don't want to be colliding with any of your echoes, as you know what they say about not meeting your parallel self in a causality loop.
Causal Loop isn't just a series of abstract puzzle rooms though, as the main game itself has a strong narrative component and is set in fairly large environments, as I step out of a facility into the rocky terrain of this alien planet. It's all the more reason to get your bearings to figure out where you need to go.
This time, I found a terminal that can power a bridge except it's on a higher platform and a key to power it is back on the lower ground. Initially, I thought of recording an echo to go down to retrieve it on to realise it can't pick the object up, while I also can't transport the key via a portal. It turns out the solution was more straightforward as I could just throw it up and then portal myself over to retrieve it before it explodes. Physics is just as important in this world, and in this case, I also needed to jump to ensure I could throw the key high enough to the platform above.
While echoes loop their actions indefinitely, timing is still important, as I find this last puzzle required me to record an echo to activate another bridge that can get me to another phase-rift only materialises for a few seconds. That meant I didn't start recording the next echo until the bridge reappeared to then ensure I had enough time to make it over and then activate two other bridges on the other side of the map in quick succession.
There's another dilemma though because although I can teleport back over and wait for this echo to activate the two bridges I need to cross, I can't cross both quickly enough before the second disappears unless I wait on a platform in between until my echo repeats the action. Yet I can also imagine a thorough speedrunner timing it perfectly so that the echo activating these two bridge terminals had just enough time to delay activating the second bridge, so that it appears just as I finish crossing the first one.
I finished the demo impressed by just how cleverly designed Causal Loop's mechanics and puzzles, only to be caught off guard by a disturbing sight as I turned a corner and came across a disturbing sight, a corpse in a space suit collapsed in a pool of blue ooze, a corpse that Walter indicates is much ‘older’—that is an older self of Bale's that was created when he had somehow shattered space-time. And from what I gather, there's an Omega with his own agenda that I'm going to need to get to the bottom of.
Having more of yourself can be a great solution to your problems then, but it may also lead to even worse problems. In any case, you can say I'm intrigued to find out more.
Causal Loop is coming soon to Epic Games Store, and you can wishlist it now.