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The Reality. The basic unit in Time Portal is a pair of photos, displayed side by side. They are nearly identical; five minor changes have been made between them. Find and click on the five differences to solve a pair of photos.

There are 200 pairs of photos, grouped into ten pairs per round. You’re on the clock, but the clock isn’t a significant factor to begin with. You have 25 minutes to find the first complete set of differences (five differences in each of ten pairs of pictures), which works out to about 2.5 minutes per pair of pictures. If you’re sharp-eyed, that’s not a difficult task. The time limit for the next round is 24 minutes. Then 23 minutes. The time limit for the final round is five minutes. That means you have to spot a difference every six seconds to complete the final round in time. That’s not going to happen.

What happens when you run out of time? You can keep playing (with a new clock), but you lose all your accumulated score (not just your score on that round, but all your score), and you start over at zero. So if you’ve racked up tens of thousands of points through the first 10 or 12 rounds … you’re back to zero, with nothing to show for your effort.

Realistically speaking, everyone will run out of time somewhere during the middle stretch, when the clock drops to 10 or 15 minutes per round. At that point, you can either press on, ignoring the clock and your score, or you can start over and trust your memory to remember where to click. Once you do that, Time Portal becomes a memory exercise as much as a perception exercise. (As far as we could tell, the same differences appeared each time you played a round.) And that’s not much fun.

What Could Have Been. There’s an intriguing storyline winding through the game — your uncle’s time-machine, and exploring why he’s missing … that has absolutely no bearing on the gameplay. There are scrambled clues behind each pair of pictures … that the game automatically unscrambles for you. There’s even a secret code sequence at the end of the game, to unlock the final message … that (again) is automatically applied, and which simply tells you to look forward to the next version of the game. With all of those possibilities, Time Portal is nothing more than spot-the-difference game, and a frustrating one, at that.

Even with just the current gameplay, Time Portal could be much more satisfying if you didn’t lose all your accumulated score when you run out of time in a round. There must be a better way to penalize a player than to completely wipe the score … one that comes to mind is begin the round again, but award less and less credit each time you have to restart it. As it is, our family got so discouraged playing the game that Dad was the only one left playing it to the end, and that was just so we could finish this review.

Other Gameplay Twists. First, in each round of ten photo pairs, two pairs match a complete photo with five cut-outs from the photo. You have to match each cut-out with where it fits on the complete photo. For us, these were much easier to solve.

Second, you get four hints per round. A hint highlights a difference; if you’re absolutely stuck on where the final difference is, a hint can be a lifesaver. However, use your hints wisely! Once you’re out of hints, you’re pretty much stuck; we learned to find all but the final four differences in a round before beginning to use hints. (Even when you run out of time and start the round over, you don’t get any more hints. The round starts up again with the same status it had when time ran out.) Using a hint costs you bonus points, but losing time costs bonus points also; you’re usually better off using your hints than spending time searching, if a high score is your goal.

Random guesses (clicks) cost 10 seconds apiece. About the only time to guess randomly is when you’ve found all but the last couple of differences and the clock has just restarted. You’re not going to score much in this round anyway, so why not waste time by randomly clicking?

The sound effects are nice, but, as with any game, you can get real tired of them after awhile. In addition to the success and failure tones, you get periodic warnings when time is expiring. The graphic quality is good, but expanding photos to fill the screen is not always the advantage it would seem — they start to lose resolution, so in some instances, you’re better off with a smaller, more tightly focussed photo than a larger image.

A Few Nits. Shortening the time each round isn’t the only way Time Portal gets harder. The differences gradually get more difficult to find. Where early rounds cut complete tree limbs from one photo, a later round might erase the gleam on a single leaf. You already know our opinion on shortening the time; making the differences more difficult to find (while a perfectly acceptable tactic on its own) just adds bad icing to this already distasteful cake.

And a few times, we’d swear we clicked on the correct location, but we got the beep for an error, rather than the trill of a success. Clicking again is rewarded, but the meantime, it adds insult to injury with the beep and a loss of 10 seconds. And in at least one memorable photo, the circle around one difference obscured another difference. We spend more than an hour on that photo (palms trees over a beach at sunset), trying to find the final difference — including a lot of random clicking and lots of restarts — before we thought to click all around the edges of the currently marked difference and found the last one.

The Bottom Line. We all really enjoyed Time Portal when we started it, but we were sincerely tired of it by the time we finished. We liked the premise, but were disappointed when the storyline had nothing to do with the gameplay. And repeatedly running out of time got very old. If you turn off your speakers and ignore the clock, you might enjoy Time Portal; otherwise, we recommend that you skip it.