Eras and the Chronoskimmer

Where in Time's central trick is to fuse the usual destination clue with a second axis the earlier games didn't have: when, not just where. Every stop on the Chronoskimmer 325i's destination panel is listed as a place bound to an era — “Italy, 1300–1699” rather than simply “Italy” — so a correct guess has to land on both halves at once.

Reading a clue in two directions

The manual's own worked example shows the chain: a witness's mention of a telescope points a player toward Galileo, whose life dates (1564–1642) and nationality (Italian) resolve to the “Italy, 1300–1699” panel entry once looked up in the bundled encyclopedia. Selecting a destination and hitting the Travel/Time Leap button triggers what the manual calls a Warp Sequence to that place and period together.

Who you're chasing, and how you catch them

The suspect side pulls from a fixed roster of sixteen dossiers, described by sex, hair colour, eye colour, and — fittingly for a history game — a favourite author and a favourite artist rather than a favourite food or film. Notes go into an Evidence Database, which checks them “against all of the criminal's dossiers”; a single match issues a warrant and switches on the Capture Robot, an automatic arrest device built into the Chronoskimmer that does the apprehending once the identifying is done.

The scale of the hunt

The full case space spans 1,500 years of history and 48 locations, and the clock is themed to match: the fictional Federal Time Travel Commission authorises a fixed number of hours per case and, per the manual, “has never granted an extension,” which is the game's way of keeping the usual case-clock pressure without breaking its own premise. The format proved durable enough that Brøderbund reused it two years later for America's Past, narrowing the same era-plus-place structure to U.S. history alone. Climb Time's own rank ladder from Time Cadet to Super Time Sleuth and the agency offers retirement after roughly eighty solved cases.