A charming little game about how fleeting life is, and how meaningful we can make every second of it. Also it’s about a bug.
Short, timely experiences can be just as meaningful as big, complex ones, and sometimes more. That’s what I’ve come to find out with Time Flies, the latest from developers Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz with Playables. The simplicity of the game — we’re a fly, we buzz around, and we have a limited amount of time to buzz around — is so stupidly easy to understand that when we’re done playing it we’re both dumbfounded at how it works perfectly and yet way more respectful of how the basics of this thing called life are exemplified in a little insect.
To put it as plainly as possible: we overthink everything. EVERYTHING.
I’m not going to over-review Time Flies. It’s just a black and white linework-based game where all we can do is move and bump into stuff. We have a clock to work against, smartly relating seconds to the lifespan of whatever country we’re in, and the fly’s bucket list of things it wants to achieve before its life is over. And when it’s over? The fly falls to the ground and dies.
THAT’S IT. THAT’S THE GAME. STOP READING.
Okay, you’ve read this far, I guess I should finish my thoughts.
Time Flies hits me in a weird way. It’s so simple that we’re forced to look at those simple fly tasks as our only tasks, that we’re sort of reverse focused on what’s important. It takes a fly EFFORT and their WHOLE LIFE to turn on a light, but we complain when we say “Alexa turn on the overhead LED lights” and it doesn’t understand us. A fly just bounces, just bumps, and then dies. It learns how to do something by dying over and over, running out of time, and when that fly figures it out it’s great reward is to die, again.
That’s where the bucket list comes into play. The little fly needs to just do something so small and inconsequential to succeed but it takes the full force of its life to do it. And can it do this or that in the full 76.5 seconds that we maybe have in the US? Nope, not all of the things. Thanks to a sneaky way of reversing clocks to get more time, the fly CAN accomplish all of the items on its list.
That lack of time makes every movement important, and playing on the Switch with its perfect use of rumble allows us to feel every bump the fly makes into surfaces, heightening the experience even more. That “dink dink dink” we hear whenever a fly bashes against a window? Now we feel it, now we know why, and now we have a stupid bit of empathy for what it’s going through.
Time Flies takes minutes, or seconds, to play to completion. It’s worth all of that time, exponentially drafted upward to hit our lives and tell us that we’re definitely, absolutely, completely caring about all the wrong things all the time, and we really should just bask in the moments.
This review is based on a Switch code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher.
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