New and smart ideas on how to juice up all-to-familiar core gameplay are a mainstay of the indie gaming movement. Ageless, while its presentation is a bit on the simple and pixelated side, manages to stand out primarily because of its smart time manipulation hook, and that helps to elevate what otherwise would have felt like a generic puzzle platformer into something more worthy of your attention and praise. Granted, though I appreciate the obvious effort to create a great game experience, I would be remiss not to note that it also has some shortcomings. Though the controls work well enough there’s also something cumbersome about the combinations of buttons you’ll find yourself needing to use, and I can’t say they ever quite felt natural. Even a minor hesitation or fumbling over buttons too often results in areas and puzzles where you’ll know what you want and need to do but will find it’s hard to put it together. In others, especially as you’re still learning how best to utilize some of your abilities, the problem can be with leaps of faith the game is thinking you’ll make in terms of using what you have at your disposal in new ways in order to proceed. The concept and some of the puzzles are a great challenge, and the game has plenty going for it, but there’s just a lack of polish and refinement that’s hard to miss and may keep it from reaching the more mainstream success of some of its contemporaries.