Time Hollow

"Beyond the Hole is a Moment from the past. The Holes you open must be closed, or time won't start up again. The holder of the Pen must have the Time to use it. Once you've gotten the hang of the Pen, come and rescue us..."

Time Hollow is a point and-click Adventure Game for the Nintendo DS. The player takes the role of Ethan Kairos, an Ordinary High School Student living with his parents, starting on the evening before his seventeenth birthday. However, during the night, Ethan dreams that his parents are caught in a fire, and upon waking discovers that he lives with his uncle and his parents disappeared twelve years ago. He then inherits a Hollow Pen: an invisible pen that can create holes through time. With this, Ethan tries to find out what happened to his parents and stop it from occuring. However, a figure from the past is always one step ahead...

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Tropes used in Time Hollow include:

• Aerith and Bob: Ethan, Timothy, Pamela, Derek, Irving, Mary, Jack, Vin, Ashley, Ben, Morris, Eva, Aaron, Olivia, Emily, Sara, Jacob...Kori, which is just an unusual spelling of Cory.
• Anime Hair: Ethan's hair has sideways spikes, and plenty of characters have strange hair colours.
• Anyone Can Die: There are probably less named characters who don't die in one alternate timeline or other than ones that do.
• Bait and Switch Credits: Being able to see the treehouse catching fire (you only see the planted stick), Ethan running through a Hole, and Ethan being the one to jump out the window and grab Kori.
• Betty and Veronica: Shy Emily and boisterous Ashley. True to form, there's a Third Option Love Interest thrown into the mix, although she's got certain complications.
• Cast From Lifespan: Using the pen accelerates your aging process. We see several users who've gone quite gray after using it too much.
• Cats Are Mean: Ethan gets a nasty scratch at the beginning of the game.
  • To be fair, it's mostly due to Sox hating baths instead of him being truly malicious.
• Chekhov's Gun: Irving with the scars under his glove.
• "Close Enough" Timeline: Ethan doesn't bother to fix the timeline in which Morris has dropped out of school because he seems happier that way.
• Color-Coded Timestop: Everytime time stops, the world turns grey.
• Cute Shotaro Boy: Complete with cute dog!
• Dangerous Seventeenth Birthday
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Sox. Maybe.
• Economy Cast
• Education Mama: Morris, though he loves to learn (even studying in his spare time after he drops out of school) and gets top marks, is made miserable by his grade-minded parents.
• Four Is Death: Ben Fourier, who kills Aaron with a pair of pliers in one reality.
• Gainax Ending: So is it Ethan's cousin, or a time duplicate, or what?
• The Glasses Gotta Go: You can make Ethan enforce this trope on Emily by having him steal her glasses from through a Hole. You're given several opportunities to give them back, but if you don't...
• Identical Grandson: The most common interpretation of a certain point in the ending.
• Idiot Hero: There are idiot heroes. And then there is Ethan Kairos. When his friend Morris tells him of a book about parallel universes that might greatly inform his current predicament, Ethan thinks about it for a moment - then decides he can't be bothered to retrieve it from their clubhouse and wants to go to a nearby antique shop instead. He routinely, stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the blindingly obvious and just as often fails to do anything to follow the leads that are actively handed to him.
• Improvised Weapon: A pair of needle-nose pliers may not sound like a particularly impressive weapon, but that doesn't stop Ben from killing Aaron with them in one timeline.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite Mary's best efforts, nothing seems to stop her son from killing Kori. The fact that this seems to be an invariant in the timeline drives the main plot of the game.
• In the Back: Kori
• Invisible to Normals: The hollow pens themselves can only be seen by other hollow pen users. Even former users can no longer see them.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Uncle Derek exhibits this with his younger self in the game's final timeline, as after going back in time and saving Kori's life, he's show to have gone into hiding and watched his younger self grow up and marry the girl he loves.
• Joshikousei: Kori, Emily and Ashley.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Good thing, too, since your cat helps you out in your adventure.
• Knife Nut: Irving seems to have knives as his weapon of choice. Mary even mentions that stopping him from pushing Kori just leads to him stabbing her.
• Likes Older Women: Ben shows traits of this, as does Aaron in a world where he never meets Olivia.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: The Big Bad does a lot of this.
• Mayfly-December Romance: Kori/Derek and Kori/Ethan, although the former is finally able to happen normally once the final version of her is saved without having to leave the flow of time.
• Meaningful Name: "Kairos", according to That Other Wiki, refers to the exact moment an action must be taken for it to work.
• Meganekko: Emily.
• Mega Neko: Okay, how many people thought that the stuffed Sox was an actual cat?
• Mind Screw: With so much time travel, how could it not be?
• Mysterious Waif: Kori
• Neck Snap: This is how Morris gets killed in one of the timelines you must fix.
• Never My Fault: Irving, big time.
• New Game+: After a fashion... I mean, it's about twenty seconds long and lets you skip the entire game. Does it really count?
  • There is a second one, which is nearly identical to the first except near the end.
• New Transfer Student: Kori
• No One Could Survive That: The classic cliff drop.
• No Romantic Resolution: Ethan never does pick between Emily, Ashley and Kori - or, when she's pulled out of the running, her identical daughter.
• Not the Fall That Kills You: How Derek saves Kori. He appears in midair, stops her fall, and the remainder of the fall isn't enough to kill her with him cushioning her.
• Not Quite Dead: Irving, after falling from a cliff.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: Ethan prevents an accident where a woman he knows dies, but the accident instead injures a boy and kills his dog.
  • He also saves someone else's life, but causes his friend to drop out of high school. Unlike with the previous example, Ethan doesn't bother to fix this.
• Numerical Theme Naming: Irving Onegin, Jack Twombly, Vin and Ashley Threeth, Ben Fourier, Morris Fivet, I can keep going...
• Offing the Offspring: Mary Onegin keeps changing the past to cause her and her son's deaths when she realizes he's a Complete Monster. Unfortunately for her, he always ends up living and she always dies.
• Omniscient Council of Vagueness: And do we ever learn who they are or what they want? No! They only speak in shadows once.
• Ordinary High School Student: Ethan until his 17th birthday.
• Photographic Memory: Flashbacks seem to work like this. They are literally represented as still images, though Ethan has to ask other people for such things as the date and location. In one instance, Ethan learns of the time of a flashback from a clock shown in the flashback itself.
• Power Perversion Potential: Ethan can have lots of fun coping a feel of Emily and Ashley in some flashbacks.
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old: Kori, due to being displaced from time.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Anyone who is a holder of a Hollow Pen or does not experience time has this. Occasionally overlaps with Only Sane Man, such as when Irving kills Ethan's homeroom teacher in the past and assumes his identity.
• Save the Villain
• Scars Are Forever
  • The game's theme song contains the lyric "No scar ever heals."
  • Irving has visible scars from an incident nineteen years earlier.
• Second Episode Morning: In chapter one.
• Secret Keeper: Morris in two early realities, and Uncle Derek in those near the end.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong
• Spiritual Successor: To Shadow of Memories.
• Spoiler Opening: Kori falling from the school.
• Stable Time Loop: The ending. And the game was doing so well at avoiding paradoxes up to that point!
• Stalker with a Crush: Irving in the past; this later upgrades to "just plain crazy" with his crossing of the Moral Event Horizon.
• Taking The Knife: Kori to Ethan. Irving tries to subvert it by stabbing him anyway, but is stopped.
• Temporal Paradox: mostly averted.
• Theme Naming: All characters apart from members of the Kairos family have a surname based on one of the twelve numbers on the clock. Kairos itself is Greek for "the perfect moment".
• Theme Tune Cameo: Ethan's ringtone is the game's theme song.
• Time Stands Still: Whenever someone uses a Hollow Pen, this happens to any non-user. Or those pulled out of time.
• Time Travel
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Ashley and Emily.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The Omniscient Council of Vagueness segment.
• White Gloves: Irving wears some of these to hide the scars he received from Kori.
• White-Haired Pretty Boy: Irving, although not pretty, does have white hair and fulfills the role of main villain.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Zig-zagged. Irving switches between trying to stop Ethan by messing with the past and just plain trying to shank him with alarming frequency.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Averted in the extremely short New Game+.
• Younger Than They Look: Timothy Kairos, Irving and Mary Onegin, all due to using Hollow Pens.