Loophole is a super smart puzzle game about time travel, assisting your future selves, and avoiding time paradoxes. I liked it a lot.
[h3]The Mechanics of Time Travel[/h3]
For the basic game mechanic, I recommend watching the trailer. Essentially, you control an alien-lizard-thing in a top-down perspective, and your goal is to reach the exit of the current area. However, you only have a limited number of turns (steps) to do so until the level starts blowing up row by row, and never enough to solve the puzzle all by your lonesome.
So what do you do? You go into a timeline cloner which ends your current timeline, rewinds time to the start of the level, and spawns a new copy of you which begins at the cloner. At that point you control the new copy, while the previous timeline version follows your previous instructions until it walks into the cloner and vanishes. As a result, you solve puzzles by co-operating with your fellow timeline clones, who help you press down buttons, open doors, carry items, etc.
The catch is that you must not cause a time paradox: if you didn't see something with timeline copy A, then during later timeline copies it must not happen within A's vision (which spans whichever room it's in): timeline copy B must not appear in its vision, and nor must adjacent doors open or items get picked up or placed down where they weren't there before.
One interesting aspect of this mechanic is that it is not enough for you to reach the exit; a level only counts as won if you both reach the exit *and* any remaining timeline clones reach their cloning chambers without encountering a paradox.
That's the game. Later puzzle regions mostly expand on this paradox mechanic, giving you more interesting ways to avoid paradoxes than just staying out of sight.
[h3]Visuals & Clarity[/h3]
Aesthetically, Loophole is rather limited in terms of art assets and presentation, but in terms of gameplay it uses the few assets it has very well. This kind of minimalism makes a lot of sense given the time loop mechanic which already makes levels visually complex enough. As-is, the visuals are quite clear.
My one minor criticism here is that there are multiple color-coded items, and in the grey fog outside your room vision, they look insufficiently distinct. A far more annoying issue is that the near-top-down perspective makes it hard to tell when the red zones are not bordered by walls. That really tripped me up in the final puzzle section and thus slightly spoiled some of those puzzles for me.
And finally, I really wish we could've more often seen adjacent levels from our own level, or that there was a way to continually replay previous solution loops, as it is quite aesthetically pleasing to watch your previous timeline clones continually solve their respective sections. So that seemed like a bit of a missed opportunity.
[h3]Puzzles & Level Progression[/h3]
I liked the puzzle difficulty here. On the lower end, easy puzzles are quick to solve while helping you gradually understand the initially very confusing timeline clone mechanic. And on the upper end, there's plenty of challenge here even though even lategame puzzles are always kept to a rather low number of puzzle-relevant objects. There's no in-game hint feature or anything, but I still only needed to look up ~3 puzzles (two in the final regular section, plus some parts of the final puzzle).
Level progression is partly nonlinear: to progress to the next section, you need to solve like two thirds of the puzzles, but solving a puzzle only unlocks adjacent ones, so a few puzzles end up being mandatory. I wish the game had been less strict in that regard. Also, to reach the full ending, you need to solve all other puzzles.
In terms of puzzle design, there were plenty of good puzzles here. And in the final regular puzzle section, there was one optional puzzle that outright blew me away with its crazyness, because you get multiple moments of trying a solution, realizing that it's impossible, adjusting your solution, realizing it's still impossible, etc.
[h3]UI[/h3]
There's an Undo, which is good and absolutely necessary. I just wish there had also been an on-screen clock to show you where in the timeline you are; as-is you occasionally need to count your steps or undo parts of your solution a few times to e.g. insert or remove a pause somewhere.
There's one lategame puzzle which I found rather unreasonable because it expects you to solve a rather complicated puzzle pretty much entirely in your head. For these puzzles, it would've been very helpful if there had been an on-screen indicator of your entered button presses, like in e.g. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/2830480/Gentoo_Rescue/]Gentoo Rescue[/url].
[h3]Conclusion[/h3]
Highly recommended, provided you don't mind time travel mechanics.
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