When I slid the timeline for the first time and watched the silver-gray cat jump back from the future to the present and press the unreachable switch for me, the red light of the surrounding monitor went out like a low tide. There are no lines, no hints, only two lives trapped in cold facilities, instantly established in the broken timeline, without words. The story of _Timelie_ begins with a silent blue, and its language is parallel time itself.
The cat and I are each other’s shadows and echoes. I control the girl to act “now”, and the cat exists in an independent timeline that can be freely stretched and contracted by me. The core of the puzzle is never a complex organ, but how to weave the tracks of two lives into a harmonious fugue on the vertical axis of time. I need to let the cat push open a box in the “past” so that the girl can climb the high platform in the “future”; I also need the girl to make a sound in the “present” to attract guards and create a gap for the cat to slip through another timeline. Our cooperation is closer than any side-to-side battle, which is an insurmountable time barrier. This connection, which relies on logic and imagination rather than force, makes every customs clearance like a melody.
The art of the game is as clean as a dream. The facilities are cold geometric lines, and the halo that represents our existence is warm goose yellow and silver white. The most moving moments often occur after the crisis is lifted. When the girl sits down gently, the cat jumps into her “present” from another timeline and curls up quietly beside her, the two halos will briefly overlap and blend. There is no written explanation, but the tranquility at that moment tells everything: in the endless maze of time, we can not be swallowed up by eternal nothingness because of each other’s existence.
_Timelie_ is a pure meditation about trust and cooperation. It stripped away all complicated narratives, leaving only the dance of time, space and two souls. It makes me believe that the most profound connection sometimes does not need a sentence, just press the only and correct switch for the other party on the staggered timeline.
