What's the time? It's time to get ill!

There's nothing more mouth-watering than respected game developers dishing out cryptic pieces of information regarding upcoming projects. Level-5 has given us some of the most enchanting games for the DS, notably the Professor Layton series, and it seems they are continuing their captivating methods of story-telling but with an entirely new game based on time-travel. The interesting catch is it's for hardware that apparently "doesn't exist yet," according to the company head.

Speaking to Famitsu (via AndriaSang), Level-5 CEO Akihiro Hino and director Jiro Ishii spoke candidly about their latest creation: Time Travelers. Ishii, who is from Nishinomiya, explains that the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995 caused the deaths of over a thousand people in the city and describes it as "a theme of calamity" that's deep within him. No doubt this will give inspiration to the game's design in some way or another.

Apparently, Ishii has been thinking about doing a game based around time-travel for a while now and sees the notion as "the ultimate ingredient" in the proverbial video game cookbook. He is also aware that designing a game using this theme will create pressure to produce something interesting and unique; citing the Toki o Kakeru Shōjo novel and the Back to the Future series as examples of work that stand up to the test of time.

No concrete details were discussed, but Ishii loves him some teasing:

I have ideas for a time travel story that no one has done before, not even in movies or novels.

Hino contributes to the head-scratching as he further teased:

It looks like it will become a large scale title. I'm also looking forward to it. I expect it to become a title that can be a popular series for Level-5...Centered on hardware that's not yet in this world, it will expand to other hardware.

With an ambiguous statement like that, there are naturally many ways you can interpret this piece of news. One is that it will initially launch on, say, the 3DS, and then go multiplatform. Another is that it will get a release on the HD consoles and their respective motion-control peripherals and then make an appearance on Nintendo systems. Or not on Nintendo systems at all. What you make of this is up to you but we certainly hope that we get to see a time-travel game with 3D visuals in the not-too-distant future. Unless it's already happened and we're living our future in reverse without even knowing it because backwards turns out to be the same as forwards. Or something.

[source andriasang.com]