Enter the Chronosphere is the type of game that is great to watch, as well as play. While I was waiting to get hands-on at PAX AUS this year, I was watching two other players, each on a different level, and playing as two different characters. They seemed to play very differently, and after watching for ten to fifteen minutes, it also helped me mentally prepare more for the tactical game that Enter the Chronosphere is, as well as what mistakes I should avoid. I then proceeded to pick up all the things I had just seen the other players ignore because they came with side effects.

In Enter the Chronosphere, everything moves at the same time. It’s a turn-based action game; in that regard, you’ll be able to slow down and think if you’d like, and each move you make is significant, but you can also watch someone else play it at X2 speed to cut down the thinking, and it’ll look like a twin-stick shooter.

When I say “everything moves at the same time,” I mean everything from players to bullets as well. This adds some tactical elements, such as shooting towards where you know an enemy is about to move, like around a corner, for example, instead of always aiming directly at them. As I progressed further in my time with the game, I realised some things, like grenades, work when thrown in the path of an enemy, and there’s a key dedicated to ‘waiting,’ or passing a turn. There seems to be a powerful mix of weapons here, too, and it doesn’t feel like the types of weapons are being made to fit a turn-based tactical gameplay more than the twin-stick action game you can mistake Enter the Chronosphere for at first. You can also see your enemies’ ammunition that’s left, so when you have some cowboy unloading a clip towards you and you’re rolling out of the way, you can pick the right moment to stop and fire back.

Things get a bit more complicated when you start getting introduced to weapons that have random effects, hand-guns with bouncy bullets and the unstable power-ups I was picking up. I don’t recall their exact name in the game, but I kept taking them, and they were very much a risk-reward-based option. I could survive in toxic gas, for instance, but there is also now weird cosmic space dust on my screen. After watching two other players decline to play the gamble, I couldn’t help but load up as much as I could, and I nearly filled a bar that I assumed indicated the maximum I should load up on before really negative things started to happen, but then I died.

A demo is available on Steam for Enter the Chronosphere, allowing you to check out the game for yourself. However, it does appear to be missing the risk-reward elements that I experienced at PAX.

[Explosion Network attended PAX Australia 2025 with a provided Media Pass.]