AI looks stupid in that first video. I still don't really know what the gameplay loop(lol) is supposed to be other than hunting down some people with a time limit or something
There is no time limit. From a post earlier:
Just to clear up this misconception, it's not on a timer. There are four stages (as far as I can tell?) and you can load into any of them at four different times of day. But once you're in a stage, time doesn't pass. There is no clock. You could enter a stage in 'morning' and spend twenty hours in there and it would still be morning.
The puzzle is doing all of the kills in 'a day' but 'a day' isn't any kind of timer. It's just cracking the puzzle so that you're doing x amount in one stage set to 'morning', exiting that stage and then loading into a different stage set to 'noon' etc etc.
once you've done a stage at a certain time setting ('afternoon' for example) you can't go back to an earlier time without resetting the whole day. That's the puzzle. But it's more about the sequence rather than a timer.