Made a mistake in 3D Boy's "World of Goo"? Just click a time bug.

Now that WoW isn’t dominating all of my game time, I’ve been on the lookout for games that are less, well, time-dominating. Putting a time limit on an RPG isn’t the problem — it’s feeling like you’re at stopping point when you reach it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve said “I’ll just finish this quest,” only to have the quest giver hand me a follow-up while exclamation points appear over a bunch of other NPCs. And I hate stopping in the middle.

The first two games I’ve picked up to play in bite-sized sessions have both generated a lot of buzz — “World of Goo” and “Braid.” I played through “World of Goo” during the winter, when my interest in “World of Warcraft” was waning, and I picked up “Braid” when a Mac version was released on May 20.

Both of these games have gotten a lot of attention because of their visual style and deceptively elegant simplicity. But one of the features that delights me most in both games is the ability to rewind. In “World of Goo,” clicking on a floating time bug lets you undo your last move. In a pinch, you can click several and go back far enough to save your precarious goo construction from ruin. In “Braid” for Mac, the “Shift” key moves you backward in time. Sometimes, this just saves you from dying. But in some of the puzzles, you have to move time backward to finish.

This rewindability is something that suits me perfectly as a player. If given the option, I’ll create an array of saved game files for everything I play so I can go back if I want or need to. (I was also one of those kids who would keep her fingers between multiple pages in “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, just in case.)

The ability to turn back time isn’t something I’ve seen in the mechanics of other games. And according to a couple of interviews by the fine folks at Joystiq, there won’t be sequels to “World of Goo” or “Braid.” So I’m left wondering — what other games or encounters would I love to rewind my way through?   (The Ganon fight in “Zelda: Twilight Princess” — one of my other post-Warcraft adventures — I’m looking at you.)

More on some of the tech that can run these games at HowStuffWorks.com:
How the Xbox 360 Works
How the Wii Works
How PCs Work