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In most Video Games time seems to be based around the main character's progress, rather than any sort of actual time. This leads to the Fridge Logic of you apparently going through an entire night in the course of a few hours. This also goes the other way in that if you stay still for several hours nothing will change at all. Very much among Acceptable Breaks from Reality, as the time of day has a large effect on the mood and atmosphere of specific scenes, along with the massive technical difficulties to which the alternative leads.

Sub-Trope of In-Universe Game Clock, when day and night pass freely without it affecting important stuff. Sister Trope of Take Your Time, when the player has to actively trigger events for time to move. Compare and contrast Eternal Equinox, when day/night cycles are always the exact same length, regardless of the season or the latitude. Also contrast Timed Mission when there is an active timer to keep your pace up to match the plot.

As this trope is omnipresent among video games, please list only aversions.


Aversions:

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    Video Games 
Action-Adventure Games

Adventure Games

  • Dark Seed: There's a game clock that runs independently of the player. You need to sleep at night and be on certain appointments on time. If you miss one, you're screwed. If you miss an action in a day, you're screwed. Thanks to this, the game was almost impossible to complete without a guide.
  • The Last Express:
    • It's (in)famous for being one of the few Adventure Games that take place entirely in real-time. From the moment you get onto that express and until you either get off or die, the time keeps ticking. If you aren't in the right spot at the right time, it's over, your train is gone.
    • It's not exactly real-time. Time runs about 5 minutes in-game time to every 1 minute of real-time, and there are time skips(such as when you sleep). Furthermore, you can't accelerate time, but if you miss a key event, you can rewind the clock to an earlier point, at the cost of not being able to undo the time reversal after about 30 seconds.
  • Quest for Glory: Most games have several timed events that occur a fixed number of days after the start. (Elementals and caravans in II, Igor's disappearance in IV, scheduled competitions, poisonings and assassinations in V, etc.) Though the games are rather relaxed in that regard — the player either has time to prepare, gets advance warnings, or has 3-7 days to figure out what to do. Still, timed disasters lock portions of the game or end the game if the player does nothing. Unrelated to that, the games have a day-night cycle, which determines what the hero can do and who he can encounter.

MMORPGs

  • City of Heroes: It has the entire day/night cycle occurring in under an hour. Also, some groups of villains only appear on the street during the night in some areas.
  • EVE Online: It has a term alarm clock op. Since everything in EVE is real-time, sometimes that tower comes out of reinforced at 3 am local time, Tuesday. Also, Eve time is GMT. So Daylight saving time changes can really screw things up.

Role-Playing Games

  • Cobra Mission: Faythe does need quite a bit of time to learn dowsing. Three hours, to be exact, but it's triggered by a Mandatory Sexual Encounter.
  • Devil Survivor makes this about as explicit as you can get—in the main navigation menu, options that take up time have a clock symbol next to them. You can run around Tokyo to your heart's content, and it still won't take any time, but stop to chat with someone along the way, and you lose another half-hour.
  • Don't Escape: You start the game with a limited amount of time (until nightfall in the first two, the oxygen supply in the third) to perform various actions to prevent your escape. Most of these actions consume small amounts of time (mixing ingredients, digging traps, etc.), while others extend the limit. Moving from room to room doesn't consume any time, though in the second game as you move from different locations (even with a car it's reduced to a few minutes).
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy V pulls it twice, once in an exploding castle and once in an underwater dive. In the former, the challenge was less getting out in time and more fighting some minibosses for bonus items while getting out. In the latter, one had to stall out a Puzzle Boss.
    • Final Fantasy VII plays this straight most of the time, but an early mission sees you setting up the bomb with a timer set up to go off in five minutes. You have to get out within those minutes, and the timer keeps ticking even in combat, even during the cutscenes!
  • Mount & Blade: You may complete quests or just run around in circles, but the wars between AI factions will carry on.
  • Ōkami: It isn't completely real-time, but day and night come and go every few minutes, and the world (i.e. characters, quests, and conversations) changes accordingly. Once you learn the brushstrokes, though, you can force day or night to occur or continue and keep the world in perpetual day/night as well. The only time you can't Take Your Time is when you must make it to Oni Island before sunset, or else the island will disappear. And it will disappear if you take too long, making you start the whole sequence over.
  • Persona:
    • Persona 3: During the first full moon, you get about nine minutes to get to the front of a train and destroy the Shadow controlling it. The clock only stops when you're on the menus. Oh, and the boss is a Mook Maker. Good luck.
    • Persona 5 Strikers: Unlike the main Persona games, time only moves when the plot says so as the entire game takes place in a much shorter time frame. Incidentally, this also means that the Phantom Thieves can enter and leave the Metaverse an unlimited number of times in the same day even though it's stated in the previous games that going to the Metaverse is physically taxing and requires a day of rest between trips.
  • Pokémon:
    • In both Gold and Silver and Black and White, real-time is game time. The time of the day has a factor on what Mons you can capture as well as some other game-related events, as does the day of the week.
    • Sword and Shield goes both ways —the Wild Area always runs in real-time, but the other areas of the base game stay at fixed times of the day based on story progression. After beating the game, the entire game world starts running in real time.
  • Star Control 2: While the game doesn't notify you of this right away, the whole game is a Timed Mission, and while you're playing the game, time passes by and significant in-game events will occur, like the time-frame including a side-quest involving saving the homeworld of the Zoq-Fot-Pik, or the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah winning their Doctrinal War against the Kzer-Za, and beginning the Death March, and while you can affect the timing or outcome of those events, wasting too much time in the game overall will eventually lead to your planet Earth being destroyed and the game ending for good.

Simulation Games

  • Animal Crossing: Real time is game time. If it's 10 pm on the clock on your wall, it's 10 pm in the game. It's a central gimmick of the game, in fact.
  • Harvest Moon: A central gimmick of the series is that a day's passage happens in a set amount of real-time, regardless of the player's actions, significantly limiting what you can do in one day, even with healing items.
  • Kerbal Space Program:
    • It models a quite realistic solar system, meaning you have to think about launch windows if you want to send missions further than Kerbin's moons.
    • However, anything done in the vehicle editor(the Space Plane Hanger or the Vehicle Assembly Building) pauses time, so you can build anything and have it ready to launch with no time passing in the real world.

Strategy Games

  • The Lords of Midnight: This turn-based game would have played it straight. However, it was implemented in a way that gives each lord their own personal clock, where one lord would be at dawn while another would be at dusk, all to represent remaining movement distance. This implementation allows for interesting results, such as having a lord approach another just before night, recruiting them, and the new recruit starts at dawn.

Survival Games

  • The Joy of Creation: Reborn: Justified. In the attic, the only way to progress the level and progress time is to attack Golden Freddy. This is because Golden Freddy is causing the loop, and the only way to beat the level is to weaken his control.

Visual Novels

  • Daughter for Dessert: MC’s foray into Mortelli’s office has no time limit. This gets hand-waved, with MC arranging for Mortelli to be on the phone with the officer at the front desk, betting that he’d talk for long enough so MC can take his time going through everything and gathering clues.

Wide Open Sandbox

  • Dead Rising: The game is going to end in 3 days. Your actions affect what ending you get but not when it comes. Other game events also happen on time regardless of player action, though on a sliding window of opportunity rather than an exact time. As long as you arrive within that timeframe the event happens and it's Always Close.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Time and weather change and march on regardless of progress. You can have the same mission twice, once at night in heavy fog, and another at noon in full sunlight. This can even make missions harder: try flying a plane (San Andreas) in a sandstorm. At night.

    Western Animation 


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