Fight monsters with the help of your past lives in Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior

I distinctly remember the first time I saw Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior. It was during Summer Game Fest last year, and the game’s brief minute-long reveal trailer was enough to leave a lasting impression. I’ve been looking forward to playing it ever since. My patience has been rewarded with the news that Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior will launch on February 13th on PC.

Lysfanga’s trailer gives you a good idea of what you can expect — this is a game where you’ll make use of time travel and your past lives to fight monsters — but it can’t quite capture how interesting and deep those time travel powers are. In the lead-up to this announcement, I spoke with Lysfanga’s developers at Sand Door Studio and had a chance to get a hands-on experience with the game’s first level.

Thibault Legouet, game director and lead game designer at Sand Door, says that he always loved time travel in video games but felt that those powers were always used in the same way. “[Time travel] was used in puzzles or in stories mainly with no regard to gameplay,” Legouet says. “And I really wanted to put it in the center of the gameplay in a way that wasn’t done [before].”

The main conceit of Lysfanga is that each fight is more than a simple combat encounter; it’s also a puzzle to be solved. You’re given an arena filled with enemies that you must defeat within a certain amount of time and a certain amount of chances. Once that time is up, you are teleported back to the beginning of the fight and forced to do it over again, this time with your “remnant” assisting you, killing the same enemies you killed in the previous loop. The number of “chances” you have determines how many times you have to kill every enemy and complete the encounter.

You know how in racing games you can race against yourself as a ghost driver? Lysfanga’s core gameplay loop is that but with fighting.

Though I only played maybe three total fights, that little bit of time was enough to validate my previous anticipation for this game. There are a lot of games that give you timey-wimey powers (hell, I was just talking about such a game last week). But there’s something special in the way Lysfanga uses those powers and gives you a time limit along with your past lives to work with, in addition to a host of combat abilities and special enemies that require thought and raw power to take down.

There’s a demo coming out during Steam’s Next Fest happening February 5th through the 12th, and the game launches on Steam and the Epic Games Store on February 13th.