Revision: You are a time traveler, sent back to investigate what caused a major historical disaster. Do you simply investigate, or do you wind up trying to change it? Is it worth changing what might affect your own history? For that matter, will it even work?
Reflex: Rather than controlling the main character’s actions throughout the day, you control their reactions to stress: fight, flight, freeze, or endure. Of course, nobody can endure everything, and this character’s particularly anxious… good luck.
I like Reflex better because it has interesting mechanics that could be entertaining to read. Revision seems like it would take a much longer time to come up with well-authored branches.
I’m not quite feeling the time traveling idea. For something as large as changing a major historical disaster, there could be a lot of possibilities and timelines and paradoxes you may have to keep track of and for our scope, it may get too complicated too quickly.
Reflex strikes me a simpler, more elegant idea and it piques my interest much more. I love the idea, and I feel that the choices you could make and the subsequent reactions on the character’s body would be interesting to read.
I agree that time travel seems pretty out of scope but probably more interesting.
Reflex to me does not seem any different than actually choosing the actions of the story and so I am not entirely sure what else to say.
It occurs to me that I’ve sort of provided the “spoilers-free” version of Revision; I should explain a bit more:
Basically, it turns out that the event you’re visiting is a thing that always has to happen, no matter what; many of your attempts to “fix” it will fail or even cause it, and that’s if you get close enough to make such an attempt. Ideally the majority of endings would involve failing to prevent or directly causing the incident, with the next biggest chunk of them simply involving finding out what happened and returning to report. There would also be some where you just fail to get anything done towards either fixing or investigating things. Maybe one or two would involve averting the incident, and the immediate aftereffects of doing so, but the main focus would be on the incident’s total inevitability.
It sounds like you’ve thought out the first idea more than the second, based on your comment. I suggest going with that – it seems to be where your mind is focused. Just make sure that the time travel loop reveal comes off as interesting, rather than cliched. Time travel happens a lot in fiction, after all.
The reflex one sounds cool, but I don’t see that going extremely far if the character is extremely prone to breaking down.
As for the time travel one, what exactly is your message? You seem to be commenting on the frivolity, perhaps fruitlessness, of time traveling by sending the player back to an event that he or she has little chance of influencing. That has potential for some strong statements but I still think it needs more development and evidence of substantial interactivity.
I agree that since you’ve thought about the time-travel idea more, I would suggest going with that one. The second idea sounded interesting, but I can also see how the choices could get repetitive.