Tempus Vitae builds its Metroidvania out of one station in two centuries

You are Alex, separated from your brother Adrian and dropped onto Theia, a futuristic space station that was built for scientific research and is now a battlefield. The dead are already piled up when you arrive. An impossible piece of technology hands you the verb the whole game is built on: jump 200 years, from 2185 to 2385 and back, standing in the same spot while the spot changes around you.

The two dates are not skins on one map. 2185 is the middle of a guerrilla war between rebel scientists and the Lawkeepers sent from Earth — factions, objectives, people to talk to. 2385 is what that war left behind: dark rusted ruins, no humans at all, and mad monsters swarming the halls. A door welded shut in one century is an open hole in the other, and moving through Theia means reading which century solves the room you are standing in.

The abilities stack on top of that jump, and they are all versions of the same idea rather than a list of powers. Stop time and the bullets already in the air stop with it. Fast-forward to build momentum. Use temporal displacement to cross the station from one corner to the other. Find temporal anomalies and nudge history sideways. The developer asks the sharpest question about it on the store page itself: how can a pistol that shoots back in time be used to open a locked door.

That question is the design in one line. It means the weapons are not a damage table with a lock-and-key system bolted next to it — the arsenal and the keyring are the same object. And it comes with a warning attached, because what you do in the present affects the future. The shortcut you open in 2185 is something you then have to live inside two centuries later.

The genius of Prey’s gloo cannon is the reference that matters most here. Its argument is that one odd adhesive gun carries combat, exploration, hazard control and improvisation all at once, and that carrying all four is exactly what makes it stand for the whole game. That is the bar for a time-travel pistol. If it shoots enemies in one room and opens a door in another but never does both in the same breath, it is two tools sharing a model. The test is whether players start inventing uses nobody wrote down.

The world design of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is the map half. Echoes cuts its planet into temple-sized regions small enough to hold in your head, precisely because a world you can carry is a world you will explore. A doubled world doubles that load: every room is two rooms, and the thing the player is actually mapping is the difference between them. Tempus Vitae promising areas with clearly defined aesthetics and hazards is the right instinct — the fastest way to know when you are is to know what it looks like.

How to combine video game genres argues that a mash-up works when each genre is given a job and all of them point at one focus. This game is stacking three of them and says so in capitals: first-person shooter, Metroidvania, time travel. The shooter owns the moment-to-moment, the Metroidvania owns the map, and time travel is the part that has to earn its place in both. If it only ever moves you between two versions of a level, it is a level-select with a story attached.

Tempus Vitae is made and self-published by [Whiteboard Games](https://whiteboard.games/), listed as coming to Windows, with the store showing 2027. Steam files it under Action, Adventure and Indie. It is single-player, with Steam achievements and full controller support.

The accessibility list is longer than most pages this size manage: adjustable text size, camera comfort, colour alternatives, contrast controls, custom volume controls, adjustable difficulty, and playable at your own pace. On a fast first-person game built around precision combat, the difficulty and pace options are the two that decide whether the time puzzles are legible to anyone who is not already good at shooters.

Around the time jumping sits the usual Metroidvania furniture, and it is the right furniture: save points, fast-travel Anchors for when the station outgrows walking, currency, shops, collectibles and upgrades, quests, and an NPC dialogue system to hold the story together. The line to be sceptical about is the bosses with complex behaviours, because a boss fight is where stopping time either becomes a real decision with a cost or becomes a free hit you take every cooldown.

If the appeal is holding two versions of one space in your head at the same time, Screenbound is the other one on this list — it splits the room between a 3D world and a handheld showing the 2D version of it, and makes the same inputs work in both. Tempus Vitae separates its two worlds by 200 years rather than by screen, but the skill it asks for is the same one: look at the world you are in, plan for the one you are not.