5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel

There is a moment in 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel where you realize your opponent's queen is not attacking your king right now but three turns ago, in a timeline that branched off twenty moves back, and that both of those things are simultaneously your problem. That moment is either the point where you close the game forever or the point where something clicks open in your brain and you cannot stop thinking about it. Conor Petersen, a solo developer, built something that should not function as a coherent game, and it genuinely does. At its core this is still chess. Pawns move one square forward, knights jump in their L-shapes, the rules of check and checkmate still apply. What changes is the board itself. Pieces can move backward through time, depositing themselves onto earlier board states and creating new branching timelines. Every timeline that contains a living king must be defended simultaneously. A rook sliding left on turn seven might land on a copy of the board from turn three, forking two realities at once. The spatial grid becomes a four-dimensional grid: rank, file, time, and timeline. The UI renders this as multiple boards arranged in a scrollable 2D plane, one column per timeline and one row per turn. It is disorienting for roughly the first hour and then, slowly, it becomes readable. The puzzle mode is where most players will honestly spend the bulk of their time, and it is exceptional. Carefully constructed scenarios teach specific mechanics in isolation before combining them in ways that feel almost mean. There is a quiet satisfaction to solving a multiverse checkmate that you just cannot manufacture in ordinary tactics puzzles, because the solution space includes directions of movement that do not exist in any other game on the planet. The solo AI exists and provides resistance, though at higher difficulties it becomes more of an endurance test than a chess-like duel. The real magic, if you have a friend willing to learn alongside you, is local or online multiplayer. Two people discovering together that one of them accidentally left a king undefended in 2018-branch-C is a shared experience unlike anything else. Where the game asks patience is in the opening hours. The tutorial is honest about complexity but cannot fully prepare you for the cognitive weight of tracking obligations across multiple timelines during actual play. Expect to feel completely lost, lose a few games to threats you could not see coming, and then gradually develop a new spatial intuition. Petersen clearly made the decision that no amount of hand-holding would substitute for simply playing until it lands. For a game this conceptually dense that is probably the right call, but shorter sessions in the first few days will serve you better than marathon attempts. The presentation is clean and functional. The soundtrack sits at a calm, slightly abstract ambient register that quietly supports concentration without demanding attention, which is exactly what a game requiring this much mental load needs. There is nothing wasteful in the production. No splash screens, no filler menus. It opens, it gives you chess across spacetime, and it trusts you to meet it halfway. For an overwhelmingly positively reviewed solo-dev release, that restraint deserves notice.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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