Time Donkey

Flashbang Studios has made a name for itself offering quirky browser games on their site Blurst. Their latest effort, Time Donkey, has gone live. You play as a taco-craving donkey, whose goal is to collect as many tacos and other fast-food items within a set time with the aid of a magical time-reversing stopwatch.

You control the donkey with the help of the WASD keys and spacebar, and also have the ability to kick boxes open and rewind time. The latter ability returns you to the checkpoint and resets all items in the stage, however your previous actions are played out by your previous self, which means it’ll pick up all the items you did and go where you went. This becomes key to reaching certain areas, as you can use your previous donkey selves to give you a leg up to high areas or to activate switches. It soon becomes apparent that the playing area is significantly larger than it seems at first, and there are a lot of different kinds of things that need to be done within the time limit in order to net the highest score. As is the norm for Blurst games, there are daily and overall leaderboards, and achievements to unlock.

The gameplay is similar in concept to the flash game Cursor*10 ¹⁾and its mind-bending sequel!, where you need the collaborative help of your various past selves to click your way to the end, but it’s in a more palatable form here with the 3D platforming. The camera isn’t perfect, and needs to be manually controlled at times with the mouse in a most cumbersome manner. The game works with the XBox 360 controller, and the camera is much better if you do switch to that, as it automatically adjusts itself behind the donkey and doesn’t get stuck anywhere.