Time Fcuk
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Time Fcuk is a play on how if one changes around the letters in a word even though it means nothing logically, we all still see it as something that its [sic] not. |
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Time Fcuk (alternatively, "Time Fukc", "Time Fkcu", etc.) is a flash game created by "Team Kufc" (which includes Edmund McMillen) and released on Newgrounds on September 16, 2009.
The player character, while idly walking by, finds himself confronted by a strange box. Out of the box comes someone looking just like him, claiming to be him from the very recent future. After telling him to get into the box himself, he forces him in.
He finds himself in a square monochrome hell.
This game is confusing.
Has nothing to do with the French Connection UK clothing line, who also uses the same lame joke.
Tropes used in Time Fcuk include:
- All Just a Dream - This is what the good ending indicates, though given what prompted the situation, it's far darker than you'd think.
- And I Must Scream - Occasionally the player will get texts from future/past selves who are stuck in a wall, screaming for help.
- Which is certainly a possibility.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall
- But Thou Must! - How the whole game begins-- "I SAID GET IN THE DAMN BOX!"
- Death Is a Slap on The Wrist - "Dying tickles!"
- Deliberately Monochrome - The "Limited palette" type.
- Enemy Within / Enemy Without - Steven is at least one of those, and because of him the main character is a Truly Single Parent and Mister Seahorse. As for why this page is using tropes rather than just describing him, you probably don't want to hear about it.
- Funetik Aksent - Inverted with your character, as the text is perfectly readable, but the voice enunciates each individual letter.
- Gainax Everything
- Getting Crap Past the Radar - The title.
- 6, 21, 3, 11
- Gosh Dang It to Heck - If you die, the texts you get will sometimes say "F-word!" or "S-word!"
- Heroic Mime - You never hear your present self, just messages from the past and future.
- Intentionally Awkward Title - Even if your try to pronounce "Fcuk" exactly like it's spelled....
- Layered World
- Level Editor - One of the game's main draws. Newgrounds even has a direct interface for downloading others' levels.
- Mind Fcuk
- Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: The voices start out sort of helpful, then just devolve into making fun of your failures.
- Multiple Endings: The final scene where all of your temporal doppelgangers are freed from the box doesn't change regardless of how you finish the final stage, but if you commit suicide, a tiny you pops out of your exploding head, takes another pill and explodes his own head, after which yet another, even tinier you pops out and repeats the process, presumably ad infinitum. However, if you actually solve the final puzzle and reach your other self, the two of you fuse into one and escape the box together.
- My Nayme Is - The title, again.
- Nintendo Hard: some of the user created levels certainly qualify.
- Platform Game
- Room Full of Crazy - The main menu.
- Sanity Slippage - Witnessed in reverse--in the beginning, texts from the future sound alternately paranoid and nihilistic. In the end, texts from the past are confused but still fairly normal.
- Shout-Out - "Pay me for the door repair!"
- Spikes of Doom - They're all wobbly. They're actually called sawblades, which explains why they kill you when touching sides of them.
- Stable Time Loop
- Stylistic Suck
- Synthetic Voice Actor - Spells as it is written in a sort of muffled robotic tone.
- Tele Frag - If you end up in a block when you switch layers, touch a flip arrow, or touch a rotate arrow, you die. Portals can be set up to do this in custom levels, turning them into death traps.
- There Can Be Only One - Steven believes that only one of you can escape the box, and when you're trapped in the final level, he asks you to kill yourself and free him. There's a way around this.
- Timey-Wimey Ball - It's not quite clear how time travel works in this game. On the one hand, you experience a linear progression of events as long as you stay alive, and every time you return to the past shows you dying and the body vanishing. On the other hand, there seem to be several different "selves" wandering around, including a paranoiac, a Perky Goth, and a tormented soul who's started hallucinating, and they don't seem to be logical progressions so much as several possibilities for how you could go nuts. Also to be noted is that, although to you Everything Fades, another self finds a room with hundreds of dead bodies, all of them you.
- Not to mention, of course, the fact that by the end of the game the player presumably has not sent any of those messages to himself... And somehow frees all of the time-displaced copies of himself from the box at once, leading to an army of himselves, none of whom have any chance of becoming the others. And yet the whole thing's kicked off by a seemingly-invoked Stable Time Loop.
- Actually, one of the people in the past who is text-messaging you said that they have just received a text-message from you as well, so it is possible you are in fact sending messages.
- Not to mention, of course, the fact that by the end of the game the player presumably has not sent any of those messages to himself... And somehow frees all of the time-displaced copies of himself from the box at once, leading to an army of himselves, none of whom have any chance of becoming the others. And yet the whole thing's kicked off by a seemingly-invoked Stable Time Loop.
- Wham! Line: When you get to the 29th level, you will get one of two messages: "Steven said something weird to me when he left. He said your name is also Steven. Is that true?" or "I feel better now that Steven is gone... I cant [sic] help but feel like maybe I'm Steven and I have been lying to you this whole time..."
- Text Back To The Future - Also, the past.
- Your Head Asplode - A symptom of the suicide pill.