CLOSING THE LOOP

Lemnis Gate looks to the past, present and future of the first-person shooter

-  ALEX SPENCER

What can you achieve within 25 seconds, really? In multiplayer shooter terms, it might be long enough to land a couple of headshots or (more often, at least in our case) to sprint from a spawn point, trying to rejoin the action before it moves on. In Lemnis Gate, though, 25 seconds is the length of an entire round, the duration of your character’s entire existence. Fortunately, you get more than one shot at it.

Once the countdown hits zero, you simply pick a different character class – ‘operatives’, in Lemnis Gate’s parlance – and play out those same seconds from a fresh perspective. And again, and again, your new actions layered atop everything you did before until there’s a full team of five fighting side by side, all controlled by a single player. So, yes, it’s another example of this season’s must-have gaming accessory, the time loop. But to understand what makes Lemnis Gate such a joyously unusual experience, it’s probably more useful to think of it as a turn-based shooter.