In His Time

My first instinct when I loaded In His Time was to sit quietly and just watch it. The art pulls you in immediately: hand-drawn silhouette characters with unsettling white pinhole eyes, moving through backdrops that feel like a child's memory of a place rather than the place itself. Comparisons to LIMBO and Badland are fair on the surface, but the tone here is softer, more fragile. This is a debut work by a single Japanese developer named Yona, released through Kodansha's indie incubator, and it carries all the weight of something made by someone who genuinely needed to make it. The story draws directly from Yona's own life, exploring a boy named Olly whose father has died and whose mother is bedridden with illness, and that autobiographical rawness is felt in every screen. The game is a side-scrolling puzzle adventure, and the platforming is essentially a non-event. What you are actually doing is solving a wide variety of context-driven puzzles: watering plants, washing dishes, working through a gear-and-symbol locking mechanism that the developer genuinely recommends taking notes for. Items collected early resurface later to unlock progress, and the best puzzles use clever visual metaphor to carry the story. A family's emotional distance is rendered as cracks spreading through a house until a chandelier falls. A character's addiction is framed as a sensation of flooding and drowning. When this kind of storytelling lands, it lands hard. The game also explores Christian faith themes, specifically forgiveness, morality, and the afterlife, through a lens that is present and intentional without feeling aggressive. One critic who approached it without religious conviction noted that the spirituality read as a genuine comfort for the characters rather than a sermon, which feels like the right way to frame it. The friction is real, though, and you deserve to know going in. The puzzle variety swings so wide that consistency is a casualty. Alongside the symbolic, story-integrated puzzles sit minigames that feel plucked from a different game entirely, including a card game in a casino, a balancing scale puzzle, and sequences that lean on awkward physics. The story is also over-ambitious for its runtime. At around four hours, it introduces a full cast of characters, including the bully trio of Bobby, Mila, and Hugo, the mysterious clockmaker Joseph, Olly's ailing mother Lyla, and several others, but does not always land the emotional beats it sets up because the pacing rushes past them. The controller button mapping is non-remappable and counterintuitive. The pseudo-language character voices, meant to replace full voice acting, strike most players as jarring rather than charming, particularly in heavier emotional scenes. These are not small complaints in a four-hour game. And yet. The art direction is genuinely cohesive and beautiful. The classical-influenced soundtrack complements the mood with more care than most games twice its size. The 21 achievements are all attainable in a single playthrough, with the option to revisit individual scenes afterward. Steam user reception sits around 85 percent positive, which feels right to me. This is a game that knows exactly what it wants to say and says most of it well. It asks for patience with the parts that wobble. If you have spent an evening with Florence or Assembled with Care and wanted something a little darker, a little more theologically textured, In His Time is that game. Just keep a notepad nearby.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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