Timelie is a Stealth-based Puzzle Game built around the idea of manipulating a timeline to guide a girl (and, later, a cat) past killer robots amid often-disintegrating levels.
A blonde girl in a white dress with pink trim wakes up in an odd, dreamlike place. As she travels through it, she finds that she can manipulate the timeline, rewinding it to take a different path, along with using odd power crystals to restore broken bridges and floors.
She also finds that she is being chased by robots who appear to want to kill her. She must slip past the robots safely, using her ability to change the timeline to keep them from catching her.
Tropes found in Timelie include:
- Air-Vent Passageway: The cat uses floor ducts to get around in ways the robots can't follow. Justified in that the cat is, well, cat-sized, and the vents are much too small for anything other than the cat.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The cat, after Chapter IV.
- Broken Tears: After Chapter V, before going toward the door, the girl is audibly crying, the only sound we hear from her.
- Cats Are Magic: The cat can also control time the same way, and after Chapter IV it ascends (as above) to let the girl work through some of the previous levels a second time.
- Chess Motifs: Chess pieces and the symbols for them show up often, although there is no explanation as to why.
- Convenient Decoy Cat: The first time the girl encounters the cat, it meows, which distracts the robot that is about to find the girl. In Chapter V, the cat will meow if it sees the girl; part of solving one level is invoking this by walking over to where the cat will come out and closing the loop.
- Downer Ending: The girl goes through the dream realm, apparently trying to escape, finds and loses the cat, goes toward the door at the end...and wakes up back in her cell, with a guard at the door.
- Golden Ending: Obtained by beating the game and getting all fifteen relics, each obtained by beating a given level with a constraint (such as 'don't kill'). A short cutscene is added after the credits, showing the girl walking down the corridor with a guard and encountering a boy who appears to be being treated as she is.
- Gotta Get Your Head Together: The girl is in this pose quite often, especially early on as she's dealing with her power.
- Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: The girl is blonde and dressed in a white dress, and while we don't get to see too much of her personality, she appears to love the cat quite a bit.
- Hub Level: The central hub contains the doors to all five chapters.
- It Was All A Dream: In the end, the girl wakes up back in her cell, which looks like the dream room she started in...except with walls, and a guard at the door.
- Magic Skirt: Whenever the girl would fall in a way that might cause the skirt to flip, the skirt always remains in place.
- Narrow Annihilation Escape: Several levels disintegrate as the girl runs through them, making that level a Timed Mission. Sometimes the disintegration works in her favor, as a robot may be disintegrated before it can catch up to her.
- No-Dialogue Episode: The entire game. The only sounds we hear from the characters are the cat's meow and (at the end) the girl crying.
- Punny Name: As seen in the image, the name is depicted with a line to turn the name into Timeline...but, instead of an honest timeline, the timeline created is a lie.
- Removed Achilles' Heel: In the bonus ending, there's a bar across one of the small floor ducts that the cat uses.
- Retcon:
- Pretty much the entire idea of the game. (The title, "Timelie", could even be a reasonable synonym for retcon.) At the end of each level, you can watch everything that happened as if it all happened seamlessly.
- One of the achievements is called this. It requires solving a puzzle in a non-obvious way (which you almost certainly didn't do the first time) to allow you to solve it again in a later level faster.
- Stable Time Loop: Chapter V involves going back in time to make sure things work as they were supposed to in earlier levels.
- Stealth-Based Game: The robots will instantly kill the girl or cat if they are caught, so they must slip past and create distractions to reach the exit.
- Time Master: The girl's (and cat's) power. She can rewind time to give herself the chance to change how she handles a situation, or to watch a patrol route to see the ideal time to move.
- Timed Mission:
- Every level is timed to some degree; when the timeline runs out, you can take no more actions. However, some are more tightly timed, either due to an unfixable problem appearing if you take too long or because the level is being eroded as the timeline advances.
- Some relic achievements require completing the level with almost no wasted time.
