Time Flies may be a few hours long, but it leaves you with this sense of quiet grandeur that showcases how the medium of video games continues to evolve and elevate. The game’s impact lasts way after you have discovered all of the game’s little secrets, figured out all of its puzzles, and weeks after you have had the credits roll.
Time Flies
Developer: Playables
Price: $19.99 CAD
Platform: Nintendo Switch (reviewed), PlayStation 5, PC, Steam, Epic Games Store, Mac App Store
The writer was supplied with a Nintendo Switch code for review.
Sometimes, when you play a game that has yet to be released, you know that, when the game does eventually release, whichever year, it will be one of the most poignant and important games of that year. This is how I felt about Time Flies when I got a chance to dabble with the game last year at PAX West.
After launching Time Flies–I stared at the screen for about 15 minutes before I pressed play. Why is that? Because it starts with a disclaimer, “The video game issues life expectancy data by country as defined by the World Health Organization.” For example, the life expectancy, where I am, in Canada, is 81.6, so almost 82 years, but that 81.6 is not 82. That .4 may seem minute or slight, but that is a person’s life, age, memories, and more condensed into a number–that .4 is massive in its own way.
Time Flies has you playing as a housefly, and depending on the country you choose each time you load the game/level, or your system gathers information due to what country you inputted on your console, it swaps out that life expectancy age to be in seconds. The seconds you have allotted are how much time your housefly has before it inevitably perishes. Though Canada gave me 81.6 seconds, I opted to play a few runs with India’s life expectancy at the start. 67.3 seconds. Or as you may have guessed, a life expectancy age of 67.3. A stark comparison between the country I live in alongside the country I was born in. 14.3 years. Er. I mean–14.3 seconds as a housefly.
As a person… again… I mean, as a fly, you have your bucket list, which lists 10 things you want to do before you die. Read a book, make friends, get rich, get drunk, and so on. Your goal is to be able to do these things as a fly in both cheeky and hilarious efforts. Each task you complete will mark it off, but the final task listed, which has you succumbing to death, needs to be finished last. Everything else can be completed in any order you would like, but this is where the strategy and speedrunning come in. You will not be able to complete each task in your first few attempts or even your first dozen attempts, but once you are able to go through different locations, find shortcuts, or learn how to progress like “Travel the Globe”, where you have to, funnily enough, walk across a globe, things start to click into place on each death.
Time Flies mixes humor, a ticking clock, and life’s fragility into a truly poignant and unique experience
You will have to complete each task again on the bucket list, but each step closer brings you to figuring out how to interact with the world, and by doing so, accomplishing each task gives you an idea of how to advance on your next life–I mean, your next run. Piloting the body of a fly, there is not much you can do; you are lightweight, tiny, but you can fly as long as you want and interact with objects. Using your entire body to click keys on a keyboard to change the computer screen and use a rotary phone to dial specific numbers gave me certain a-ha moments with the game’s puzzles. The game’s obstacles rely on your ingenuity and understanding that you are controlling a fly. By really tapping in, you find wholesome, cute, and unorthodox solutions that only a fly can solve. For example, with the rotary phone I mentioned above, there is a number you have to call, which you can find on the fridge. But to call that number, you place yourself, as a fly, on each number, turn the dial completely in a circular fashion without letting go, and repeat with each number until the NPC on the other end picks up. That is the smoothest outcome, but for me, I learned about the numbered sequence in an earlier run, died, and then on a later run, remembered the number, and brought the whole plan to fruition to call the NPC. It made me feel accomplished and zoned into the game experience.
As a fly, you are extremely fragile, so your time is not just the only way to die, but you can also get zapped by lightbulbs, have your guts splattered from an air conditioner, or even drown from a droplet of water hitting you. And every year–err–every second counts, and it can be gone in an instant over the most superfluous conditions. Either the conditions you started as a fly, or the conditions you face due to your immediate surroundings.
If you are like me, seeing that number of life expectancy you can change or choose from at the start of each run–makes me think about aspects that have caused that number to be so different in many places in the world. Colonization, medical access, and other sociological factors that many people cannot ever control. The game reminds me of the time when India was creating the most vaccines for COVID in the entire world, and its own citizens could not even use the vaccines they created at all because America was hoarding vaccines as priority, while more than 50% of the American population decried about COVID being fake, which led to vaccines just being damaged, wasted, or expired. Or that I, and other Canadians, had to wait six months for our second vaccine for COVID. Time Flies reminds me of these events and more. It reminds me of redlining, colonization, colonialism, segregation, and poverty that rage in different parts of the world, broken down by how many seconds I have for a run as a fly.
I really do not want to hear much about what people think about the largest or longest AAA games of this year–I want to hear about how players felt deeply with their time in Time Flies. These are the discussions I hope we see more of in this landscape.
The Final Word
Time Flies is a profoundly poignant game, allows you to look within yourself and especially with factors that are at play for each person, to hammer down that sonder, if you still have yet to obtain that sense of clarity, or if that sliver of reflection needs to continue growing. Being able to mix gameplay hilarity with the looming death that is ever approaching in this stylistically hand-drawn black and white world fascinates me. Just because you are as tiny as a fly in this game, does not mean your impact on its world is also tiny.
MonsterVine Rating: 5 out of 5 – Excellent
