Sci-fi games about time travel

Released in 1988, Alien Fires 2199 AD looks and plays like someone tried to translate a fever dream into a sci-fi RPG. You control some dude with a chin of steel and a crew that seems perpetually confused. The interface is clunky, the combat baffling, and the plot? Something about galactic diplomacy, maybe? It’s not quite “so bad it&rsq...

1990’s Back to the Future Part 2 for DOS is a game that tries very hard to be as confusing as time travel itself. You’re Marty McFly, zipping between timelines, avoiding paradoxes, and trying to not get arrested for pixelated trespassing. The gameplay consists of side-scrolling, light puzzle-solving, and deep regret. It looks like someo...

Based on the film that made air guitar cool (briefly), Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is a time-traveling puzzler where history class meets stoner logic. Gather historical figures, survive bizarre puzzles, and pray that your keyboard shortcuts are more righteous than bogus. Totally excellent if you're into 8-bit Plato and medieval mini-games.

Day of the Tentacle is a point-and-click graphic adventure game developed and published by LucasArts. It was released in 1993 as a sequel to the game Maniac Mansion. The storyline revolves around three main characters: Bernard Bernoulli, Hoagie, and Laverne. The trio becomes entangled in a time-traveling escapade caused by the Purple Tentacle, an e...

Flying Tigers is an abandoned vertical-scrolling sci-fi themed shoot 'em up game developed and released by Ticsoft in 1994 for MS-DOS only. Flying Tigers is the first chapter of the two parts Flying Tigers video game series.

The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Presto Studios, released in 1995 as a sequel to The Journeyman Project. The Journeyman Project series is set in a future where time travel has been discovered and is regulated by a temporal security agency called the Temporal Security Annex (TSA). Players...

The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time is the third chapter in The Journeyman Project series. It's a science fiction adventure game developed by Presto Studios, designed by Phil Saunders and published by Red Orb Entertainment in 1998 for Windows and Macintosh.

Time Bandit is a classic top-down arcade-style video game that was released in 1982 for various home computer systems, such as the Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and others. It was developed by MichTron. In Time Bandit, players control a character who must navigate through a series of maze-like levels, battling various enemies and collecting treasure a...

Waxworks was a horror-themed first-person role-playing game developed by Horror Soft, a subsidiary of Adventure Soft, published in 1992. The game is set in a wax museum where players must travel through different historical periods, each represented by a wax exhibit. Each exhibit serves as a portal to a different time and place, featuring vari...

Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? is an educational computer game and television game show franchise created by Broderbund. It focuses on teaching geography and history while players try to track down the infamous thief, Carmen Sandiego, and her gang across different historical periods.The game was first released in 1989, followed by the TV show in...