Time Flies review – existential flight game with a bittersweet buzz

The Guardian

a day ago

The death of a housefly is usually an unceremonious event. Within minutes of the insect's appearance in our periphery, a tide of annoyance rises, and with the quick thwap of a swatter or rolled-up magazine, the bug is gone. Time Flies, a perception-warping bug puzzler, reimagines this inevitably short lifespan as an absurd tragedy – by providing the soon-to-perish pest with a bucket list.
Over the course of roughly a minute, players freely buzz around minimalist 2D environments in an effort to make those last wishes come true. The fly's dreams arrive as vague, far-ranging clues such as 'make someone laugh', 'find God', 'start a revolution' and 'get rich', and it's your job to ricochet around the space until you land, often literally, on a clarifying and usually funny realisation. Similar to Coal Supper's satirical side-scroller, Thank Goodness You're Here!, Time Flies relies wholly on experimentation and intuition to understand the world around you, rather than explicit quest markers or info dumps.
There are four levels in total, including an art-stuffed museum, a flowing sewer and two busy bric-a-brac filled homes. The game's scratchy monochromatic visual style frames each space, with the seemingly quaint locations hiding a host of philosophical quandaries and innocuous jokes. Buzzing about, you set off all manner of environmental set-pieces, the details of which are delightfully silly: you can make the Mona Lisa smile by landing on her nose, get drunk on spilled wine, or even grow a flower from a waterlogged corpse. Notably, though, not every action leads to a checked box on the bucket list, and for every Rube Goldberg machine or Jenga tower you discover in the game's open levels, there are plenty of sharp or gooey life-ending hazards to find as well.
The central point of friction here is that there are only so many seconds in a day, and you'll need to not only discover all the bucket list activities in a level, but also chain them together to unlock the next one. Putting together a perfect route is a straightforward but thoroughly engaging challenge, further complicated by the existence of time-shifting clocks that can be tinkered with to add precious seconds to your painfully short lifespan.
Perhaps what makes Time Flies' conceit so convincing is how infuriating it can be to control the fly, and how annoying it is to listen to its incessant buzzing as you endeavour to meet the criteria. Tapping and holding the arrow keys allows you to direct the fly, but during particularly dexterous activities – such as collecting coins while avoiding an incinerating lightbulb or flying through a statue's intestines to make it fart – the controls feel appropriately unwieldy. Over time, the repetitious process of reincarnation becomes an uncanny mirror, reflecting our own futile desire for order in a world plagued with unpredictable obstacles. Even with our comparatively epic lifespans, many of us will struggle to achieve some of the fly's loftier ambitions, unless we reorient what those ambitions mean to us – something that Time Flies insists we contemplate.
Mocked by the clock and the whizzing sounds in your ears, Time Flies gets under your skin not only because it's a clever puzzle game, but because it manages to break down its profound ideas into easily digestible nuggets of gameplay. By blending its thinky thesis with such playful mechanics, Time Flies supplies a lighthearted canvas for players to engage with existentialism for an hour or two. As you seek a sense of meaning for the fly by ticking off their ambitions, there's plenty of room left for you to muse about your own.
Time Flies is out now, £11.49