Rewinding Ophelia’s Fate: Time Loop Mechanics and Rewind Play in Elsinore

This paper analyzes the 2019 narrative simulation game Elsinore through the dual frameworks of Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric and Janet Murray’s kaleidoscopic play, situating the game within broader shifts in game studies that emphasize player agency, systemic meaning, and narrative multiplicity. In recent years, video games have increasingly been understood not only as sites of play, but as platforms for cultural discourse, ethical simulation, and interpretive engagement. Elsinore exemplifies this trend, presenting a time-loop narrative in which players, as Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, repeatedly relive four days in an attempt to alter tragic events. Through these cycles, players accumulate knowledge, confront moral dilemmas, and explore a branching narrative landscape. Drawing on Bogost’s theory, this study explores how the game’s rule-based structure communicates ideological and philosophical claims through procedural systems. At the same time, Murray’s concept of kaleidoscopic play frames the player’s experience as a process of narrative recombination and recursive interpretation, where meaning is not fixed but continually reshaped. By bridging system-driven rhetoric with exploratory narrative form, this paper demonstrates how Elsinore enables complex forms of meaning-making unique to the medium of interactive storytelling.