Time Hollow

Did You Know?

• The main theme song was composed and arranged by Masanori Akita.
• The theme song appeared on the Japanese PlayStation 2 version of Dance Dance Revolution SuperNova 2 and the Arcade and North American PlayStation 2 version of Dance Dance Revolution X.
• In Japan, Famitsu gave the game a score of 32 out of 40.

Gameplay

In Time Hollow, players guide protagonist Ethan Kairos on a quest to locate his vanished parents. He wields a Hollow Pen, which lets him draw circular portals into the past after a flashback triggers at a specific spot. Through these openings, he can retrieve or deposit objects and people, and simply watch earlier events unfold. While a portal remains open, time freezes, though some characters can still interact with Ethan. Each portal is drawn with the stylus, and closing one costs a unit of "Time," which functions like health. These units, called Chrons, are replenished by finding Ethan's cat, Sox, hidden in the game world. Animated cutscenes depict key moments and flashbacks. The backgrounds are static images, layered to create a 3D depth effect when the view shifts side to side.

Plot

In Time Hollow, protagonist Ethan Kairos wakes on his seventeenth birthday to find his parents, Timothy and Pamela, have vanished. The world around him has shifted so that they have been missing for twelve years. A green pen he discovers can open doorways into the past, and a note tied to his cat’s collar leads him to a dumpster behind his school, where he finds a message from his father. Using the pen, Ethan alters past events to fix strange problems that arise, and he alone remembers the previous timelines. He meets Kori Twelves, a girl who also seems displaced from time. Ethan eventually learns that another user of a Hollow Pen, Irving Onegin, is rewriting history out of revenge, believing Ethan killed his mother. After a confrontation, Irving steps through his own portal and takes the identity of Ethan’s teacher. Ethan stops several attempts on his friends’ lives and rescues his parents from a restaurant explosion that originally caused their disappearance. He faces Irving again, causing him to fall from a cliff. Ethan then realizes that Irving’s mother used her own Hollow Pen to commit suicide, driven by guilt over not preventing Irving from murdering Kori. Ethan’s uncle steps in to save Kori after Irving tries to kill her, preventing the entire chain of events. To avoid a time paradox, Ethan sends the pen and the note back to his past self. Every character’s last name refers to numbers or time. The protagonist’s surname, Kairos, is Latin for “the fullness of time” and comes from the ancient Greek word for the opportune moment.