Time-travel stories live and die on their rules, and Tempus Vitae wants you to break them on purpose. Announced at the Latin American Games Showcase — Summer Game Fest Edition 2026, Whiteboard Games’ ambitious project is a sci-fi metroidvania first-person shooter that hands you an arsenal of temporal powers and a doomed space station to unravel. It is headed to PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, targeting 2027.
You play as Alex, an astronaut knocked loose from time aboard the station Theia — a place that is falling apart in two different eras at once. Theia is doomed in the war-torn year 2185 and again in the post-apocalyptic 2385, and Alex is caught between them, piecing together what happened while searching for a lost brother.
Time as your whole toolkit
The hook is that time is not just the setting, it is the gear. You can stop time to freeze enemy bullets mid-air and weave through them, jump the full 200 years between Theia’s two timelines, and hunt down temporal anomalies that let you reach back and alter history. There is even a fast-forward to build momentum and a temporal displacement ability for zipping across the station — each one doubling as both a combat trick and a traversal key.
A shooter built like a metroidvania
True to the genre, Theia is one big interlocking map rather than a corridor of levels. Paths that are sealed early open up as you earn new weapons and powers, encouraging the backtracking and “ah, now I can get there” moments that define a good metroidvania. Whiteboard is pairing that structure with fast, precise gunplay and a roster of bosses whose complex patterns are meant to test everything the time powers can do.
More than a shooting gallery
There is a story scaffold holding it all together, too, with objectives, quests and an NPC dialogue system threaded through the station so the moment-to-moment shooting has somewhere to lead. It is a lot to promise for a small team, but the concept — a metroidvania FPS where the map is also a timeline — is exactly the kind of swing that makes regional showcases worth watching.
Tempus Vitae does not have a firm date beyond its 2027 window, but it is on Steam to wishlist now. It was one of the standout new announcements from a Latin American Games Showcase that ran more than 80 games deep this year.
