That’s according to Brian Fargo, founder and CEO of inXile Entertainment, the game’s developer (he’s been in the news lately for other things; he’s not keen on characters and missions and stories being done by artificial intelligence).

Clockwork Revolution showed up at this year’s Xbox Games Showcase, and even before the announcement we knew it was going to be an Unreal Engine 5-powered first-person steampunk RPG from the developers of Arcanum: From Steamworks and Magick Obscura. Fargo also talked about this game on The Fourth Curtain podcast, explaining why he teamed up with Jason Anderson and Chad Moore, and why there’s a big emphasis on time travel reactions, which he explained by explaining a scene.

“I got the guys that did Arcanum, and I’d worked with them before: Chad Moore and Jason Anderson. I was getting Twitter [messages] all the time: you should redo Arcanum, you should redo Arcanum. I knew there was interest in the category, and I’ve always liked steampunk. I thought, you know what, there hasn’t been a steampunk RPG since Arcanum. Well, there was Dishonored and Bioshock, but I don’t consider those RPGs. Wonderful products, but not really RPGs as we define them. So I thought, all right, I can get these guys to work on this and it’ll be exciting. Then I got even more excited about Clockwork Revolution. We started talking about time travel and then it was really like, okay. I mean, it hurts my brain from a reactivity perspective, but the idea that I could go back in time and change some things and see the ramifications, that’s kind of the ultimate reactivity. We’re just leaning into it so much to make sure… It can’t be a parlor trick, it has to be like real reactivity that you’re doing.

I’m going to pimp a scene that I’m not supposed to talk about, but whatever. For example, my favorite scene so far in Clockwork Revolution is, there’s this serial killer. He’s in a cage like Hannibal Lecter. He’s crazy and all his victims are on the wall. You go back in time and you meet him, but at that point he hasn’t killed anybody. He hasn’t done anything. So you can kill him, but it feels a little awkward, you feel a little shitty because he doesn’t know what’s going on. I mean, you know what’s going to happen to him and you don’t know why, but all you know is that he hasn’t done anything yet.

He’s begging for his life. You can let him go, you can kill him, or you can kind of shoot him and then halfway through go, okay, whatever. Forget it. When you come back to the present, he’s not a serial killer, he’s an advocate for victims’ rights, for people who break into houses and shoot people. I love that dark humor. That kind of stuff, whether we pay it off in a big way, like okay, now it’s run by the crime syndicate or now it’s run by the church. Or even something like that on a smaller scale. Maybe you go back in time with a red hat and they’re like, oh my God, we love your hat. You come back and you started a fad. Everybody loves red hats now. That’s the stuff that I think is very entertaining,” Fargo said.

In Clockwork Revolution, you can create your own character and explore the Victorian-era metropolis of Avalon, but it turns out that its current state was created through time travel by Lady Ironwood, its ruler. The game has an unknown release date and is available for the Xbox series and PC (Steam).

Source: WCCFTech