The game was written by Junko Kawano,[3] whose PlayStation 2 work Shadow of Memories also features a young man using a time-travelling device to try and alter their future.

Time Hollow is a graphic adventure game, in which the player controls protagonist Ethan Kairos as he attempts to find his missing parents.

Using the "Hollow Pen", he is able to open circular portals into the past after he has experienced a "flashback" of a certain location.

Portions of Time equivalent to one portal, called "Chrons", can be recovered by finding Ethan's cat, Sox, in the game world.

Ethan uses the pen to solve problems that suddenly and mysteriously occur, thus changing the present, though he himself is able to remember these past parallel universes.

After a final confrontation, Irving steps through his own portal, taking the identity of Ethan's teacher in order to exact his plan.

After thwarting a series of determined attempts to murder his friends by Irving, he saves his parents from a restaurant explosion that caused their disappearance.

Ethan realizes that Irving's mother committed suicide using her own Hollow Pen out of guilt for the fact that she could not prevent her son from killing Kori.

At the end of the game, Ethan sends the pen and note back to his past self to prevent a time paradox.

The main character of Time Hollow, a normal high school student who lives with his family.

On the morning of his seventeenth birthday, he discovered that the world had changed into one where his parents went missing 12 years ago.

"Tokio Horō" is a pun on the Japanese pronunciation of the word "hollow" as well as on "time corridor" (toki no horou).

She has a cheerful personality and doesn't focus on difficult problems, but she's a caring mother who always puts her family first.

Originally posing as an antiques dealer, he has been altering time to mess with the Kairos family and Ethan's friends.

Irving's mother, who also possesses a hollow pen, which means she remains active when a time hole is opened.

She died in a bus accident 35 years ago, which motivates Irving to get revenge on the Kairos family.

She takes up fortune-telling and accurately predicts incident points for Ethan, which doubles as an in-game hint device.

[6] GameSpot praised its "great concept" and "vivid artwork", but thought that the gameplay was "overly simple" and "restrictively linear," with "very little for you to figure out for yourself.