Time Flows is the result of an ambitious attempt to make games expressive rather than competitive. Nice idea...
Thus begins Time Flows But Does Not Return, an indie-game by developer Shape of Games, is ambitious in its scope but flawed in execution. However, it's attempts like this that make the indie-genre so vital to the industry. High marks for ambition, but low marks for execution. If I scored this game solely by it's aim, nothing less than a 9 or 10 would be deserved. Since I'm scoring this game based on gameplay and aesthetic presentation, those high marks are vastly truncated. While I could imagine 10 different people giving this game 10 different scores, I'm only one and thus, will grade accordingly.
In TFBDNR, the gameplay is very very simple, and amounts to something like "My Simon" if you remember that hand-held puzzle game from a while back. You move your character to a spot on the screen and trigger a button-pressing assignment, something like "press X 5 times" or "press in this order YAXB". You then proceed to execute the command a few times to fill up a meter before another dot appears on the screen with different instructions. The game then proceeds by issuing manual instructions which you then execute to move on. It's purported lack of competition could go either way - there are sill obstacles to overcome here, namely button pressing in sequence, but there is no penalty for failure - so while I'm not convinced we've reached "expression" at this point that's categorically different from, say Mass Effect 2's "expression", since there is no penalty for failure, categorically it is correct that everyone wins, thus no competition. So I guess the competitive nature of this game depends on whether obstacles do or do not constitute competition.
Regardless, the gameplay is pretty boring unfortunately. While I'm not totally opposed to the concept of repetition and execution here, it could have been done in a vastly more interesting manner, especially by incorporating player-generated sequences into the game or by including better "Expressions" whether they be visual, musical, or other. This is because the aesthetics here are very very simplistic, such that there is virtually nothing to look at while you're playing beyond the black screen with a few dots. In fact, it is so stripped of any gratifying visuals or aesthetic presence that I have to think its intentional - that the very lack of presentation was a part of this whole experiment. Either way, I have a hard time thinking of it as redemable. For me, its a significant lack, and a big drawback from the game.
Bottom line: experimentation is great and I applaud this game's intentions. But boring play with little to see ends up trumping everything else, ultimately resulting in a poor expression.