Spoiler: This Game Begins At The End And Is Played In Reverse. With A Guitar.

Matt Gilgenbach is the kind of forward thinker who makes a video game to propose to his girlfriend, fakes his way onto an MTV reality show (or so he told me), and creates a video game like Retro/Grade that is played entirely in reverse.

Gilgenbach’s game has come a long way since I tried it a couple of years ago as part of the Independent Games Festival. Its graphics have improved a lot. But its core concepts remain as wild as they ever were. Gilgenback explains them well in the video we shot together at the Penny Arcade Expo last weekend, but in case you can’t watch it:

This is a side-scrolling space-ship shooter that plays in a state of rewinding time. You un-shoot enemy ships into existence and re-dodge lasers that your past self already dodged. If you are hit by them before they had ever been fired, you would cause a paradox (that’s bad). The game is controlled with a Rock Band or Guitar Hero controller, since you do all this dodging and un-shooting to a rhythm.

Watch the video. It’ll make sense. Retro/Grade is set to come out next year as a downloadable game for the PlayStation 3 and for other platforms, Gilgenbach hopes.