The second mission involves the discovery that humanity's enemies have their own squabbles. The mission changes and you're forced to transport captured enemies back to base. This part of the mission vexed me as I wound up stuck in a stressful section of the past, revising orders to avoid attacks and running low on chrono-energy. I discovered a devious twist: traveling into the past to issue a new order doesn't erase the orders given later in a timeline. A tank that is told to move south, for example, will still try to move south even if you go into the past and tell it to first move north. Got that? There's an out-clause to this too: the game allows you to erase any "future" orders, but that costs energy.

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In the third mission, Holloway has problems with another human commander, Rathke, who races off to the east of a large map to attack an encampment of enemies. Holloway and the player need to stop their own excursion, go back to the past and use new orders to instead charge east for a rescue. As I played this mission, I perpetually looked at the future of the timeline. Sometimes that future part of the timeline would show that my units were about to receive a lot of damage. I'd also sometimes get an alert about Holloway's future death, including the exact minute and second of his passing. The man isn't supposed to die. But you can avoid it, as I had to, by changing orders in the past or present. I made those tweaks, hoping I'd see the red bars in the timeline's future, shrink away and the Holloway death alert disappear. (I had even bigger problems when I accidentally guided Holloway to his death in the past. I could jump further back into the past to save him, but had to worry about that encroaching wave of immutability. Once it passed, I couldn't save Holloway. Mission failed.)

Hazard has a wonderful metaphor for his game, one he uses to explain why he has trouble going back to games that don't have an Achron-style timeline. "It's like going from a word processor to a typewriter," he told me. "You want to be able to undo and revise the document." In Achron, you can bookmark multiple moments in the timeline—in the past, present and future. You can jump to any of them and use your units there. You can undo their moves and issue new ones. Until the past becomes the immutable past, you can keep revising, keep poking at the events of this history you've made and change them. This is essential to succeeding in Achron, even as early as in the game's fourth mission.

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In mission four, Holloway has a problem. There is a bomb to the west and he must go into the past to stop it from exploding. In the present, he has access to a chronal transporter that can zap him back to any moment in the timeline that the player clicks on. He also has access to a teleporter that will zap him to any place on the map the player clicks on. Both the time and space transporters can only move units that are within a set range, so Holloway has to be near them before jumping. The player must send Holloway and a few tanks to the past, but the player is also warned to keep a few units in the present. Sure enough, as Holloway goes into the past to teleport into the enemy stronghold and destroy three bombs, alien enemies attack the chronal transporter close to the present.

In the present, which is becoming the future, enemies attack. But before they do, something odd happens. While Holloway is working on the bombs he catches up to the part of the timeline right before he jumped back in time. Briefly, the game warns, there are two Holloways, both available for the player to control. The limitation is that the pre-time-jump Holloway shouldn't be moved far away from the chronal transporter If he is moved away, it will never send him to the past. He'll never destroy the bombs. It'll be a disaster. In Achron's multiplayer—and, yes, all of these tactics and more can be used in multiplayer—players use this kind of time travel to double their units. That's one of the reasons Hazard's team implemented the wave that forges the immutable past, to limit this kind of tactic. In this early campaign mission, however, it's a mere novelty, not an exploit, that two Holloway's co-exist, both products of the player's orders both available for further control and revision of command.

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The fourth mission was hard. Rather, I think I made the fourth mission hard, because, for a while, I hadn't re-thought the way I think of time. I'd send Holloway back in time to work on the bombs. Then I'd get an alert about the attack happening close to the present on the chronal transporter. I'd jump to that moment, leaving bomb-destroying Holloway to the orders I'd queued for him, and I'd focus on the attack in the... future, which I thought of as the present. With my eyes off of Holloway, he kept dying. I'd fend off the attack on the chronal transporter, but to what end? Holloway kept failing to stop those bombs in the past. Finally, I realized, I didn't need to worry so much about the attack on the chronal machine. I could let my forces die trying to defend it. I could let it be destroyed. Why? Because I could fix that later. My priority was in the past with Holloway. I could allow future tragedy to occur because I could always undo future tragedy. I wasn't playing a typewriter. Hazard was right. Things weren't linear and revision was possible. I was playing a word-processor.

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I've only made it four missions into the game, but I look forward to playing more. Hazard is right that what Achron does changes the way one looks at one's actions in a video game. It's empowering to see the past, present and future all at once and to know they all can be changed. It's exciting to re-shape a timeline. And it's terrifying to think how brutally skilled multiplayer Achron gamers would use such abilities to wipe out players like me before—literally before—we even know what's happening.

Achron (official site here) runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Hazard and the team of six regular employees of Hazardous Software believe their Windows and Linux versions are furthers along but are optimistic that all will be ready for sale late summer. Hazard recommends that Windows users have a "decent" dual core system with an ATI or Nvidia card from the last three years. Achron may not catch your eye in screenshots, but make sure you've got something to play this. This game revises how we can play a video game and has got me wondering about what we should be able to do about the decisions we make in games. Achron is an advance. It's an idea that was well worth incubating since 1999.