Singularity – Time Traveling Stories Should Come with Footnotes

In a way, time traveling is the ultimate frontier for the human mind. Consider the amount of questions that can be derived form the paradox of the astronauts, one leaving on Earth and one on a rocket swirling around space, who grow old at different speeds.

That's a sort of time travel. In a way, memories are time travel and much of today's technological advances are used for the concept of time travel, which involves relieving the past via photographs, videos and audio. And, for those who haven't had enough, there's the time travel of fiction books and video games: going back to a time that was, changing things and then returning to the present in order to see what's changed and how.

Singularity is interesting for all those who like to think about time, space, gravity and the laws of physics. After all, this is a game featuring a gadget that can manipulate the flow of time on certain objects and characters to advance the plot or to win difficult battles. And Singularity also features a complex and at times slightly bewildering plot about how events, which take place in the past can influence the present and lead to diverging parallel realities (at least that's how I understood it).

Singularity is notable because it manages to touch on some complex subjects: can we really change the past? Is there any such thing as freedom to act? How can one man use almost absolute power without abusing it? These are interesting discussions and are well explored in Singularity. It would have been nice to see more resources devoted to exploring this kind of ideas through the use of E99 and the Time Manipulation Device.

The game would have benefited from being a little more BioShock, with a less developed gun play system and more attention focused on the ideas it is built upon. Unfortunately, Singularity is not going to start the kind of conversations of the first BioShock about free will and path dependency but it's still worth playing until the end of the discussion about time and absolutism.

This is a game diary. A full review of Singularity is also available on Softpedia.