Time is in your hands now.
"Seize control of time itself to break through waves of foes in this singleplayer hack and slash with roguelite elements"
—The game description
HOURS is a Roblox game that is mainly about messing with time, and other such things. It was made by Roblox user superrun100 in 2020, June 10th. You choose a "Host" AKA a player character and a "Tempo", a time related ability. Each Host has a different set of abilities, and all have widely different play styles. Tempos also influence this, some being made for specific play styles. The game encourages you to play as the different characters, as some things are locked behind beating levels or challenges as a certain character. The game, according to the description, is a hack-and-slash-kinda-rogue-lite-go-crazy kind of game. The game has unusual lore for a Roblox game, concerning many hidden names. It is mainly known for how it has interesting time related abilities though instead of the story. You can play it here
, but you'll need a Roblox account first.
Scroll down off to the tropes list to view examples.
HOURS TROPE EXAMPLES - OVERTURE
- Ambiguous Situation: The whole game. You don't know what's happening, you're just playing as a character with control over time killing personifications of Roblox items. Is this a trial? Maybe. A loop? Perhaps. Are you breaking out of a loop? I dunno. All you know for real is that you are in a level, and that you will be killing enemies.
- Attack! Attack! Attack!: Both the Invader and the Parting encourage this playstyle, in different ways:
- The Invader has Empower, a move that increases damage dealt and gives it lifesteal. The catch is that this move has a lengthy cooldown, and a short duration that can only be extended by landing melee attacks. Thus, the Invader has to constantly be on the offensive to make the most of it.
- The Parting takes it even further. He has a combo meter that's built by landing attacks, which can be consumed to increase the power of his finishers. It decays over time, and gets reduced whenever he takes damage. Relentless attacking is, therefore, necessary to reach his full potential.
- Boring, but Practical: The Equinox has a solid amount of health, the ability to regenerate by dealing damage with one of their swords, and stagger immunity. However, its ridiculous windup and winddown on all of its attacks make it a slog to complete the game as.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: By default, each Host has their own color:
- The Invader is green.
- The Prophet is cyan.
- The Witness is red.
- The Artisan is yellow-orange.
- The Vestige is purple.
- The Visitor is dark blue.
- The Subject is magenta.
- The Parting is bright teal.
- Downloadable Content: The "Hands Of Time" game pass will grant you 14 new unlockable Tempos (time abilities), 1 Host and 3 modifiers.
- Flunky Boss: While facing off against you, Ronin Alpha is assisted by a giant noob named Goliath Omega, who can subsequently drop in additional normal-sized noobs who can gang up on you along with Ronin Alpha.
- Glass Cannon: The Dreamer and the Hellion can be considered this.
- The Dreamer has the second lowest health in the game, though packs some of the highest damage output out of all of the hosts, being able to utterly decimate enemies and bosses in milliseconds even with their health boosts from the Dreamer's passive.
- The Hellion boasts the lowest health in the game, relying on his myriad of evasive skills to avoid death. While his paintball gun boasts a strong damage output on its own, his car can easily gouge large chunks out of any enemy's health should they get caught in its path.
- Healing Boss: The first boss Equinox heals through two ways. The first one is through hitting the player(or the player's allies) with the Darkheart which will heal Equinox 100% of the damage it deals, the second one is the "Dark Tornado" attack which Equinox does after reaching below 33% HP. It saps HP from any entity within it's range and gives it to Equinox.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Get too close to Bloxxerman? He'll plunge a giant nail through you if you're not prepared, stunning you and leaving you completely vulnerable to his next attack.
- Improvised Weapon: The final boss Resident Mind attempts to crush you with a piano after phase 1.
- Improbable Weapon User: Various enemies use odd items as weapons, such as a horse head with pink glowing eyes capable of shooting balls of energy at you. One of player characters, the Witness engages in this too, possessing a banjo that he smacks people with.
- Joke Item: In contrast to the various other powerful time manipulation abilities players can choose from, the Page tempo, when activated, instantly kills the player. Even when overclocked, all it does is automatically change the player into a random Host with random upgrades every 5 seconds, which is all-but-guaranteed to disorient the player for no real benefit.
- Mechanically Unusual Fighter: The Subject is this, with his all but one of his moves dedicated to a semi-complex potion brewing system that can test the player's ability to memorize and plan in real-time.
- Mighty Glacier: The Visitor and Bloxxer are notable examples of this.
- The Visitor's main defense lies not in his health pool, but his passive, Skin. With each of his six (can be increased) charges of skin, he is able to absorb one attack with the equivalent of 10 armor at a base recharge rate of 5 seconds. His Beam boasts some of the strongest DPS in the game, especially if you manage to land the final explosive hit of the attack. Additionally, one of his upgrades, Antimatter Horn, grants a high-power attack that drains health for a charge that staggers rapidly and deals massive damage over the course of 3 seconds.
- The Bloxxer has a large pool of health and can dish out huge amounts of damage at all distances with his arsenal of nail attacks, though has the lowest move speed in the game by a wide margin, with his only way of dodging attacks being a 12 second cooldown move that can teleport him to any spot on the map, including where he was just at.
- More Dakka: Hey, remember Hot Rash? Well, as a host, he can pull out two AK-47's and begin unleashing an inaccurate barrage of bullets that boasts some of the highest damage output in the game.
- Parasol of Pain: The Visitor's weapon is a metal umbrella capable of shooting a laser beam and digging through the ground.
- Physical Scars, Psychological Scars: One of the hosts, the Vestige having one eye represents how broken he is, to the point of being considered (or literally) having half a soul. Either way, his lost eye is a metaphor for the psychological and/or spiritual scars he has sustained.
- Play as a Boss: All the bosses can be unlocked, complete with all their abilities and stats.
- Player Character: All of the Hosts, as they are all characters with their own stories.
- Pre-Final Boss: While Ronin might seem like the final boss, considering the fact that his level is called the "grand finale", it is actually just the precursor of the actual final boss, Resident Mind.
- Post Endgame Content: After beating the game, you unlock the character "Vestige", who will also open up the ability to unlock some other things.
- Promoted to Playable: All the bosses and a few of the enemies get this treatment, the game allowing you to unlock them through completing certain tasks.
- Really 700 Years Old: The third boss, Ronin Alpha may seem like the average Robloxian noob avatar with no signs of age. But once you look at his title, "The First Drifter", you realize that he is much, much older than he seems to be considering the fact that he is the first drifter.
- Self-Damaging Attack Backfire: The Visitor has an upgrade called Hurting Me that causes any enemy's melee attack to become this. This is especially hilarious with the Hellion, who will instantly die if he tries to use his car to run over a Visitor with this upgrade.
- Sequential Boss: The Final Boss, Resident Mind, consists of three different phases.
- Phase 1: A brutal Bullet Hell consisting of six different attacks of varying difficulty.
- Phase 2: A Mirror Match between you and a learning A.I. with an identical copy of your host, down to the upgrades.
- Phase 3: A straight battle between you and the Resident Mind, who packs numerous high-power attacks that can easily shred you.
- Shed Armor, Gain Speed: With Full Husk, the Visitor gains a considerable 50% movement speed boost while not having his maximum amount of Skin.
- Shout-Out:
- The game makes many references to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, with characters mimicking poses, some themselves being references like Easy Lover which is extremely similar to a stand. There are also references hidden in names and abilities too.
- Some tempos like the ones related to timestopping are both a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and Dragon Ball Super, their visual effects taking qualities from the aforementioned works such as cracks appearing all over the screen, and the gray tone applied.
- Both the Subject and the Vestige have upgrades named after Mine Craft items.
- Summon Magic: The Artisan's gameplay mainly revolves around utilizing its many mechanical summons to compensate for its middling performance on its own, allowing for either the Artisan to use its decent defense to distract enemies while its summons chip away their health, or for the Artisan to let loose with all of its attacks while the enemies are too busy trying to kill the summons.
- Symbol Face: The main playable characters all have symbols on their faces. The Invader has as a symbol which resembles M, the Prophet has a symbol that resembles a pair of I, and so on and so forth. Few Hosts have anything that passes for a face. While some symbols can be explained, such as the Vestige's, who's symbol represents a headset and an eye (possibly related to how he's a sniper and may have had people to communicate to, before he was banished from the Guilty), most can't.
- Time Abyss: Some of the characters of HOURS are implied to be extremely old.
- The second boss, "Bloxxerman", has the title of "Builder of the Realm", which implies that he existed even before the realm of HOURS even existed.
- One of the Hosts, the Witness may be this based off of his scrapped description, calling him "Memories from the Beginning of the Realm", implying that he is as old as the world.
- Time Master: The main premise of the game, with you playing as a Host that can use a wide variety of Tempos that allow you to manipulate time to your advantage in different ways.
- Unlockable Content: The second page of Hosts and Tempos are all characters that can be unlocked by doing special things, such as Word, a tempo that can be unlocked by doing a certain thing after the final battle. That certain thing is driving off the broken path as Hellion and touching the blue button.
