IFComp08 Review: Anachronist
Time travel puzzlebox games are not exactly new, but I like them a lot. So I was very disappointed in Anachronist. The basic gimmick is that you are travelling around a bunch of time periods, trying to destroy the bad vibes left by someone else's time travel. Also, as standard, doing things in one time period has effects in the other periods. That's fine as far as it goes, but in the classical version of this, you plant an acorn in the past and then in the future there is a might oak tree you can climb. In Anachronist, on the other hand, you feed a horse some oats in the past and in the future a hovercycle now has a fully-charged power cell.
That's definitely a new take on things - your actions echo metaphorically through the ages instead of causally - but it's completely opaque. I had to go to the hints file to learn even how to learn this.
Add to this a horribly buggy implementation (objects with a detailed description that applies to an entirely different object, vehicles you can stand on but then never get off of, etc.) and this one is pretty much a loss.