Get in the fcuking box!
Time Fcuk is a play on how if one changes around the letters in a word even though it means nothing logically, we all still see it as something that its [sic] not.
Time Fkuc
(alternatively, "Time Fukc", "Time Fkcu", etc.) is an Adobe Flash game created by "Team Kufc" (which includes Edmund McMillen) and released on Newgrounds on September 16, 2009.
The player character, while idly walking by, finds himself confronted by a strange box. Out of the box comes someone looking just like him, claiming to be him from the very recent future. After telling him to get into the box himself, he forces him in.
He finds himself in a square monochrome hell.
Got an updated release along with other games by Edmund McMillen in The Basement Collection.
Has nothing to do with the French Connection UK clothing line, which uses the same joke.
Tropes in Time Fcuk:
- And I Must Scream: Occasionally the player will get texts from future/past selves who are stuck in a wall, screaming for help. Which is certainly a possibility.
- Apocalyptic Log: Steven's letter to himself in the Chapter Two ending:"Don't stop writing this message Steven... if you stop we die, if you die there is nothing left of us, keep writing, please i beg you.. dont stop writing this message. ive put up with too much to let it all end like this, and its all your fault. YOU DID THIS TO US STEVEN! DONT STOP WRITING THIS MESSAGE STEVEN! PLEASE, I DONT WANT TO DIE, I DONT WANT TO BE FORGOTTEN, PLEASE KEEP WRITING THIS MES"
- Bonus Level: Chapter Two, which is more of a series of bonus levels, is unlocked upon completing the Basement Collection version of the game.
- Dual-World Gameplay: Warping between layers is used to get past obstacles - although warping into a wall is fatal. Blocks warp with the player, which can also break open walls. Some levels will also cycle between three layers instead of 2.
- Funetik Aksent: Inverted with your character, as the text is perfectly readable, but the voice enunciates each individual letter.
- Garrulous Growth: The game features Steven, a growth with which the narrator claims to converse. The game's story is highly ambiguous, so it's not at all clear if Steven really is a talking growth or, indeed, if he really is anything at all.
- Gosh Dang It to Heck!: If you die, the texts you get will sometimes say "F-word!", "S-word!" or "C-word!"
- Gravity Screw: There are these buttons that you can press that will cause gravity to flip upside down.
- Heroic Mime: You never hear your present self, just messages from the past and future.
- Intentionally Awkward Title: Even if you try to pronounce "Fcuk" exactly like it's spelled....
- Level Editor: One of the game's main draws. Newgrounds even has a direct interface for downloading others' levels.
- Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: The voices start out sort of helpful, then just devolve into making fun of your failures.
- Multiple Endings:
- The final scene where all of your temporal doppelgangers are freed from the box doesn't change regardless of how you finish the final stage, but if you commit suicide, a tiny you pops out of your exploding head, takes another pill and explodes his own head, after which yet another, even tinier you pops out and repeats the process, presumably ad infinitum. However, if you actually solve the final puzzle and reach your other self, the two of you fuse into one and escape the box together.
- In the Basement Collection version, beating the game unlocks Chapter Two. Completing that results in the final ending, which is... the first two endings in succession, followed by a different monologue, this one a letter from one Steven to another, or possibly to himself, or... something.
- My Nayme Is: The title is spelled Time Fcuk.
- Press X to Die: Pushing the restart button causes the player to pop a cyanide pill, which for some reason causes his head to explode. Doing this in the final stage when prompted nets you the bad ending.
- Sanity Slippage: Witnessed in reverse—in the beginning, texts from the future sound alternately paranoid and nihilistic. In the end, texts from the past are confused but still fairly normal.
- Shout-Out:
- Spikes of Doom: They're all wobbly. They're actually called sawblades, which explains why they kill you when touching sides of them.
- Stealth Sequel: According to the creators, the protagonist is a future version of the title character of The Binding of Isaac.
- Synthetic Voice Actor: Spells as it is written in a sort of muffled robotic tone.
- Tele-Frag: If you end up in a block when you switch layers, touch a flip arrow, or touch a rotate arrow, you die. Portals can be set up to do this in custom levels, turning them into death traps.
- There Can Be Only One: Steven believes that only one of you can escape the box, and when you're trapped in the final level, he asks you to kill yourself and free him. There's a way around this.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: It's not quite clear how time travel works in this game. On the one hand, you experience a linear progression of events as long as you stay alive, and every time you return to the past shows you dying and the body vanishing. On the other hand, there seem to be several different "selves" wandering around, including a paranoiac, a Perky Goth, and a tormented soul who's started hallucinating, and they don't seem to be logical progressions so much as several possibilities for how you could go nuts. Also to be noted is that, although to you Everything Fades, another self finds a room with hundreds of dead bodies, all of them you. Not to mention, of course, the fact that by the end of the game the player presumably has not sent any of those messages to himself... And somehow frees all of the time-displaced copies of himself from the box at once, leading to an army of himselves, none of whom have any chance of becoming the others. And yet the whole thing's kicked off by a seemingly-invoked Stable Time Loop.
- Updated Re-release: Part of The Basement Collection, an assortment of Edmund's games given similar treatment.
- Wham Line: When you get to the 29th level, you will get one of two messages: "Steven said something weird to me when he left. He said your name is also Steven. Is that true?" or "I feel better now that Steven is gone... I cant [sic] help but feel like maybe I'm Steven and I have been lying to you this whole time..."
