A Fuse in Time
October 2020. Adam repairs old radios, and in his gran's garden workshop a brass device rings although it is unplugged. One small repair later he is standing at a Bratislava tram stop in 1995.
A painterly point-and-click adventure across five eras, fully voiced.
Trailer
The story
October 2020. Adam Perry repairs tape recorders and anything else that plays. His gran Mira is in quarantine and talks to him through a closed window, and in her garden workshop an old brass device called ZVON has started to ring, although nobody has plugged it in.
Adam does what a repairman does: he takes off the cover and changes a fuse. The next moment he is standing at a tram stop in Bratislava in June 1995, with his bag, a phone with no signal and a pocket chronometer that keeps his memory safe. Back home, Gran is fading from the family photo.
To bring her back he follows the device through five eras: the Dubravka housing estate in the summer of 1995 and in the snow of December 1982, the village of Ivanka pri Dunaji in June 1962 and the mountain resort of Jasna in the winter of 2035. He meets people who are younger than he is, a gran who isn't a gran yet, and a future that tidies away everything that does not match its records. Names included.
Nobody gets shot and nothing is against the clock. You look closely, listen, carry things across the decades and talk to people. A small change in 1982 can grow into a tree by 2020.
Features
- 69 places in a painted style, each based on a real place: Dubravka, Karlova Ves, the Old Town, Ruzinov and Petrzalka in Bratislava, Cierna Voda just outside the city, the village of Ivanka pri Dunaji and Jasna below Chopok.
- Five eras – 1962, 1982, 1995, 2020 and 2035 – and the same school yard, tram stop and physics room in 1982, 1995 and 2020.
- More than forty characters, some of them met at two, three or four different ages.
- Fully voiced with synthetic voices: about 2,600 recorded lines and more than three hours of speech.
- 11 side quests, 5 puzzles, 12 hidden bells and 28 achievements.
- Three difficulty levels that change how much the hints give away. No combat, no dying, no timers.
- Classic mouse controls: a double click skips the walk and holding Space shows the places you can click. The whole game can also be played with the keyboard alone or with a controller.
- Subtitles for everything, adjustable subtitle size and text speed, reduced motion and high-contrast labels.
Screenshots
Bratislava, 1995. Emil's metronome goes on the little table on the Old Bridge, with the castle across the Danube. 
Dubravka, December 1982. Adam tells young Tony that he has come from 2020. Tony finds that very far away. 
Jasna, winter 2035. Outside Hotel Jasna, Nina watches Adam's name fall apart on her visitor list, letter by letter. 
Ivanka pri Dunaji, June 1962. In Otto's workshop, time travel turns out to need leather and rivets. 
October 2020. Gran is in quarantine, so the talk about the old ZVON device happens on the phone, through her window. 
Mileticova market, 1995. Frank's scales have jammed, and Adam's fingers fit where Frank's don't. 
One of the five puzzles: turn a transparent overlay until it lines up with an old map of measuring points. 
At the Dubravka stop in 1982 the chronometer opens the way: pick the year to travel to.
System requirements
| Minimum | Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Windows 10, 64-bit | Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit |
| Processor | 64-bit dual-core CPU with SSE4.2 | Quad-core CPU, 3 GHz |
| Memory | 4 GB RAM | 8 GB RAM |
| Graphics | OpenGL 3.3 with 1 GB of video memory | OpenGL 3.3 with 2 GB of video memory |
| Storage | 1 GB | 1 GB |
Linux (preview): 64-bit, glibc 2.27 or newer. macOS (preview): macOS 12 or newer, Apple Silicon or Intel; the app is not notarized yet, so the first start needs System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. Mouse and keyboard or a controller.
How AI was used
Everything in the game was made in advance, during development; nothing is generated by AI while you play.
- Art: the backgrounds, characters, items, scene and epilogue pictures, interface art and icon were painted with AI image models (Google Nano Banana Pro and Nano Banana 2) from freely licensed photos of the real places, OpenStreetMap reconstructions and our own sketches; the character and background animations were made from those paintings with AI image-to-video models (MiniMax Hailuo, Kling, Wan, Seedance). The photo sources are credited in the game. The store images were made the same way from the game's own art; their lettering is set in a font.
- Voices: every spoken line is a synthetic text-to-speech voice (Google Gemini TTS). No real person's voice was cloned.
- Music: the nine music tracks were generated with an AI music model (Google Lyria 3 Pro).
- Writing: the story texts, the dialogue and the English translation were written with an AI assistant (Anthropic Claude), checked by a second AI model (OpenAI GPT) and reviewed and approved by the developer.
- The program code was also written with an AI assistant.
- Not AI: the sound effects and ambience (CC0 libraries such as Kenney and Freesound) and the fonts (Alegreya, SIL Open Font License).
Licence and privacy
Developed and published by DNSTUFF. The game's art is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; the photos it was painted from and their authors are listed in the game under Credits.
The game has no accounts, no analytics and no tracking of its own: privacy policy of A Fuse in Time.