Das Stundenglas (English: The Hourglass) is a German text adventure game published in 1990 by Software 2000 and developed by Weltenschmiede (de), and released for Amiga, Atari ST and DOS.

Das Stundenglas takes place in the year 2012, in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth which has been devastated by a man-made ecological disaster.

[1] The game begins with the protagonist being chased by a group of bandits while in the ruins of a small town, but they escape into an abandoned toy store.

The protagonist discovers a chest, opens it and climbs inside; they then are transported to another world: the town of Munterwassertal, which translates to lively water valley in English.

Das Stundenglas includes fantasy creatures such as trolls, witches, dragons and a descendant of the Loch Ness Monster.

[2] The eponymous hourglass is missing along with half of the town's residents, and the protagonist must find twelve coins in order to bring everything and everyone back,[1] and fix the mistakes of the present post-apocalyptic world through actions in the past.

[2][1] In the short novel included alongside Das Stundenglas, it is revealed that eighty years prior to the game's setting, Sir Percival Glanfoss, while seeking a method of time travel, first discovered a time-travelling chest in a Tibetan monastery.

[5] Evers first created concept art for Das Stundenglas by drawing on the back of a receipt while riding home in a taxi.

Amiga Joker praised Das Stundenglas's compatibility with multi-clause sentences, which are common in German parlance.

ASM simultaneously praised and criticized Das Stundenglas's dialogue system with NPCs, calling it 'extensive' but "glitchy", expressing that "All in all, my opinion is that the price of this game is too high.

Amiga Joker praised Das Stundenglas's plot as "philosophical" and "sophisticated" due to its post-apocalyptic theme and analysis of the "chaos and unrest" in modern times.

Amiga Joker praises Das's puzzles as "new and original", and expresses in their conclusion that they "can say without exaggeration that Evers and Niedermeier have accomplished a lot of work: Das Stundenglas makes possible what many have thought impossible - a German language text adventure game that (almost) reaches the quality of classic Infocom games.

Power Play further criticized Das Stundenglas as 'feeling dated', expressing that "a "Wonderland" type of adventure isn't very modern.