The Origin of Madame Time

This is a superhero story with a callback to last year's "The Owl Consults", the ending of which has sent a nuclear airship falling towards an abandoned amusement park where an all-out battle is taking place between various superheroes and supervillains. The impending crash sends us into a panic and we stop time, because that's our superpower. It's not entirely clear whether this is us discovering the ability for the first time or if we've always known we could do this: we're set up more as a superhero groupie with the instincts of an innocent bystander, but our attitude to STOPPING TIME seems strangely blasé for such a character.

As a game, it's short, simple and inoffensive; I found the puzzles pretty easy. We've got to get every character in the vicinity to safety, heroes and villains alike, before allowing time to proceed as normal. With everyone essentially reduced to human-sized dry goods, it's largely a question of locating them and finding a way to move them.

There's a certain humour about it, of course. That's rather unavoidable, given the situation. The superpowered folk we're supposed to rescue are also pretty off-beat, and the very fact that we're supposed to use them as objects is a bit of absurd humour. It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but it's at least a bit of an ongoing internal chuckle.

As a breakfast, I think this might be a large bowl of Cocoa Puffs cereal, a mug of Ovaltine, and a marathon of Saturday morning cartoons. Fun and done.