In Recur, when the world ends, or at least when the apocalypse begins, an ordinary postman discovers an extraordinary new ability. He suddenly gains the power to bend time to his will. By moving forward, time resumes its natural flow and events unfold as normal (though ‘normal’ is relative in an end-of-the-world scenario of course). Standing still brings everything to a halt, every city-shattering explosion, every derailing train, every collapsing scaffold freezes in mid-air, suspended in time and space. Moving backward rewinds time, undoing what has already happened and restoring events to their previous state. So, to stop the catastrophe, our capeless hero just has to walk… backward. Right? Of course, it’s not that simple.
Now, the idea of manipulating time is nothing new in a video game and German indie developer Kaleidoscube freely admits they were inspired by a couple of modern-day classics. “We had the initial idea for Recur already in 2018, after playing the then recently released Inside,” says Managing Director & Game Designer Dominik Schön. “We looked into different time-based mechanics and created a small prototype, but then realized how complicated it will be to really turn it into a game. So we stopped working on the idea.” It wasn’t until someone introduced them to Braid that the team realized they needed to dig deeper to put their own spin on it.
But before Recur could fully take shape, Kaleidoscube had another story to tell. While still students at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, the team worked on a project that quickly outgrew its original scope. A Juggler’s Tale, a beautifully staged narrative about a string puppet named Abby, was initially planned as a three-month assignment. But, as Schön recalls, they enjoyed the world, story and mechanics so much that they simply could not stop working on it. “So we founded our game studio Kaleidoscube with this game and developed it further until it was ready to be released.” After three years of development the title launched in 2021 and was generally praised for its distinct visual storytelling.
Time scrolling
When the dust settled after their first release, the team returned to their shelved prototype with renewed interest. “The idea just always stuck with us,” Schön says. “Also because we then had Braid as a reference. But we always envisioned this game to be more 3D than 2D. So you can also move toward or away from the camera while time stands still and a lot of other things we felt Braid didn’t do.” The challenge was to take a well-explored mechanic, time travel, or as they like to call it: time scrolling, and turn it into something both technically innovative and narratively fresh.
That ambition required a careful balancing act. For Kaleidoscube, worldbuilding and gameplay are tightly interwoven. “We are always trying to create gameplay that suits the story and a story that works together with the gameplay,” Schön explains. That synergy led to significant design challenges, particularly with how the player experiences the story in a world where time is frozen. “Just telling a story in a game where you are stuck in time, and therefore you are pretty lonely, was hard in itself,” he says. “You have to think of the player progression and flow in terms of game design, while maybe at the same time some important story beat has to happen that shakes everything up. We found our solutions to that particular problem, but it will spoil the story, so I am going to be quiet.”
Consistency of time
Maintaining internal logic was essential. The team made a bold decision: in Recur, time is directly linked to the protagonist’s position. This rule became the beating heart of the game’s systems. “With Recur, I think it’s the consistency of the time mechanic that I am most proud of,” says Schön. But that consistency led to both surprising wins and frustrating complications. “When we added a cutscene in which the character gets scared and jumps a little bit to the side… suddenly the environment moved with that jump, which was something we hadn’t even thought about. But we found it very cool! Sometimes, this consistency can be a huge problem as well, when we want the character to, for example, drop something on someone’s head. How would that even work? Would the object freeze when we are moving back in time to the location where we dropped it?”
Visually, Recur continues Kaleidoscube’s tradition of stylized art, but pushes their aesthetic language in a different direction. “We are always trying to do stylized graphics. It’s just like that with stylized art you never know from which time a game is,” Schön says. The team experimented with textures early on but ultimately landed on a hybrid approach. “When we gave these polygons an outline, basically a comic book look, everything was starting to look very cool.” Influences ranged from their own previous work to boundary-pushing animation in cinema. “Of course we also got inspired from recently successful movies like Into the Spider-Verse or the Netflix movie Klaus,” he adds.
Small team
Beyond the creative hurdles, there were practical challenges as well. Funding indie games is never easy, but Kaleidoscube was fortunate in securing support from both regional and federal programs. “We were lucky enough to receive a lot of government funding for the prototype phase of the project,” Schön says, citing MFG Baden-Württemberg and the German Ministry of Economic Affairs. More recently, publisher Astra Logical came on board to support full production. For outreach, the team leans on social platforms: “We are doing our little marketing clips on TikTok and Instagram which are performing really well.”
With the project well underway, Schön reflects on the structure that has allowed Kaleidoscube to thrive. “Working in a small team is the best,” he says. “With our current team size of 7 to 8 people we are still small enough that everyone knows what is going on at all times, but big enough to have so many different talents in the team.” Striking that balance, between creative control and production capacity, has become a guiding principle for the studio. “If we became even bigger, the whole production would slow down because of communication issues. So, finding the right team size, that is something we really learnt.”
Releasedate for Recur is not yet known, but you can wishlist here.