It was Superhot that first made me think about the old writer's adage, that you do the slow stuff fast and the fast stuff slow. This is the thinking that powers Jack Reacher novels, for example - Lee Child talks about this trick often and with great clarity. If Reacher's doing a bunch of research, you whip through it in a couple of lines. Literary montage! If Reacher's outside a bar, though, and a horseshoe of bad'uns is forming around him, time slows until it forms a thick mineral goop that traps everyone within it. The next few seconds are going to involve the shattering of kneecaps and the bruising of aortas (if aortas are a thing that can be bruised - having typed it, I am unconvinced). The next few seconds are going to be violent and memorable. Crucially, the next few seconds are going to take eight or nine pages to play out, because every move will be examined in great forensic detail. We will count the separate sparks in the air, and be deafened by the clatter of a spent cartridge case rattling on the tarmac. We will be fully present and fully conscious in these terrible, glorious moments.

Is Superhot turn-based? Not really, but it's a unique kind of meter, certainly - the work of a ludic Dave Brubeck. It is strange, given the unprecedented control over the variables that make up the universe they afford, that many games are so uninterested in time. Sure, they shatter it into loops with the death and save systems. They may also slow it, Reacher-like, when the guns come out. But genuine inventions, such as Superhot's world in which time only moves when you do? These genuine inventions are quite rare.

I've been thinking of all this these past few weeks as I've been playing, by sheer coincidence, through a range of rather brilliant turn-based tactic games, some of which have come out and some of which are yet to be released. Turn-based tactic games are hardly inventive by this point, but they definitely force you to think about time, about how it is broken up, and about what happens when you can pause it and step outside of it and really ponder your actions. Specifically, the games I've been playing have made me think about the way that time affects storytelling, and I think I'm ready to present my findings. Turn-based games, I suspect, are uniquely suited to generating incredible stories. They are more cinematic in the narrative sense than the games that we lazily refer to as being cinematic. And I think this is because of time.

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I have heard All Walls Must Fall described as a blend of real-time and turn-based tactical action, set in a retro-futuristic Berlin in which the Cold War never ended and where all matters of consequence unfold in the procedurally-generated nightclubs favoured by gay time-travelling superspies. Deep breath. Influences cover everything from Twelve Monkeys and X-Com to Invisible Inc, Superhot and - when it comes to the wonderfully grungy animation that chops together 2D character models and low-poly 3D backgrounds - the old Paddington Bear children's series that was so memorably narrated by Michael Hordern. It all sounds a bit complicated really. But it isn't. When you get into a fight here, All Walls Must Fall is gloriously, deliriously, skull-shakingly straightforward.

Gunfights are when All Walls Must Fall switches from behaving like a real-time nightclub exploration game (one of my favourite genres) and becomes a turn-based, grid-based tactical battler (which happens, rather neatly, to be my other favourite genre). You play as a hulking metal-armed killer who has been sent looping back through time within a single night so as to stop a bomb going off in the present. This means that time is as much his plaything in shootouts as space is. In fact, when you're exploring in the real-time mode, time is space. Each room you scout out rewards you with a few units of time resource that allow you to do all sorts of rewind-based shenanigans when the guns emerge. Time is space! Einstein would be proud. I bet he'd be well up for some futuristic clubbing, too.

Oh dear. I've made it sound very complicated again. It really isn't. Once the guns emerge a grid is imposed on the landscape and enemy targets are picked out with bright highlights. You can shoot them - weapons frequently have a couple of distinct attack modes - and you can dash around from one square to the next dodging incoming fire. The system's sufficiently kind so as to warn you when you're planning on moving into a square that means you'll be taking damage. The perks of a time-traveller, I guess.

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Super cool tech-noir tactics game All Walls Must Fall leaves Early Access and launches proper on Steam on 23rd February.

Developer inbetweengames has lowered the price to 7.19, but there will also be a 30 per cent discount for launch.

All Walls Must Fall is set in Berlin 2089 where the Cold War never ended. You control a time-travelling secret agent who only has one night of clubbing to prevent a nuclear terror attack.

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