Time Ramesside (A New Reckoning)

I spend a lot of time defending slow openers, rough-edged pixel art, and one-person passion projects that nobody else bothers to cover. Time Ramesside (A New Reckoning) asked a lot of my patience and goodwill, and I gave it both. What came back was not a diamond in the rough. It was, sincerely, one of the most broken first-person shooters I have encountered on Steam in years of watching this space. The premise has genuine bones: scientist Mark Faroh discovers a method of harvesting energy from biological organisms, and the greed of others tears his life apart. A post-apocalyptic world filled with zombies and giant insects is the backdrop. The setup could anchor a scrappy, atmospheric indie FPS. It does not. The story is relayed through static slides, riddled with spelling and grammar errors, set in Times New Roman on a black background. The opening cutscene loops long enough to feel punitive. What follows, once you reach actual gameplay, is a first-person shooter where weapon damage is inconsistent shot to shot, jump height varies for no discernible reason, and the default key bindings assign the menu to the Q key. No tutorial text explains the mechanics in any coherent sequence. The technical side compounds everything. The frame rate swings erratically, which is a particular cruelty in an FPS where stability is a baseline expectation. Enemies built from pre-purchased Unreal Engine assets clip through floors and walls. The audio, whether combat sounds or ambient atmosphere, cuts out unpredictably or is mixed so poorly that extended sessions produce genuine discomfort. The level design is incomplete in places, requiring a player to wander without any signal for how to trigger a transition to the next area. At various points post-launch the developer pulled entire levels, swapped out the AI, changed the core genre framing from action-horror to survival-horror and back, and scrubbed story elements entirely, meaning any given build bears little resemblance to the one before it. The game has a 35 percent positive rating across the Steam reviews that exist, and that number tells a coherent story. To the developer's credit, there has been genuine effort over the years: AI rewrites, level redesigns, lighting fixes, reworked weapon damage values. That willingness to keep iterating is not nothing, and I do not dismiss it. But iteration applied to a foundation this unstable rarely produces something playable. If there is a kind of viewer who might extract entertainment from Time Ramesside, it is the player who finds a specific pleasure in the archaeology of bad game design, who watches Jim Sterling, who treats the experience as an interactive curiosity rather than a game to finish. For anyone else, the time spent here does not return with interest.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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