THE UNREAL-TIME STRATEGY OF EXPERIMENTAL GAMEPLAY DARLING ACHRON

The game that’s getting the biggest buzz from this year’s GDC Experimental Gameplay Sessions? Christopher Hazard and Michael Resnick’s Achron, which — contrary to (my) first impression — isn’t a typo of the classic EA board/strategy game, but is instead a “meta-time strategy game.”

That is to say it makes Braid‘s back-and-forth-scrubbing time manipulations look like baby business next to its own essentially asynchronous (in every respect) multiplayer strategy. The video above gives a general idea how a multiplayer game might operate — with the ability to manipulate your troops within a window of each time-wave and erase potential mistakes — and is the only gameplay instruction in which you’ll hear a developer refer to “when your enemy is” without skipping a beat.

More info on and more videos of the game are available at the official Achron site.

Achron – Time Travel is Coming [Hazardous Software]