Time Flies review - the life and death of a bluebottle

Metro

2 days ago

An inspired new indie game casts you as a hapless house fly, attempting to complete its bucket list before it succumbs to the inevitable.
Swiss developer Playables isn't exactly a household name, but you may have come across their 2019 art piece-meets-mobile game Kids, in which you herded hundreds of tiny stick men into a hole, then assisted them along what appeared to be a long alimentary canal. It's a studio that specialises in creating interactive toys that inhabit the strange cusp between video games and non-interactive art.
A number of their titles have a stark, hand drawn black and white aesthetic, which is also the case for Time Flies – a game built around strict principles of minimalism. Its control scheme uses only the left stick, which is enough to let you fly, land, and interact with the game's beautiful, yet decidedly minimal props and sets.
Starting with a house fly on a flat surface, you nudge the stick left and right to walk, or push it upwards to take to the air, which also starts a timer. In an interesting twist that, true to form, the developer neither addresses nor explains, your fly has a lifetime that's equivalent to a specific country's life expectancy, converting years to seconds.
That means a United Kingdom-dwelling fly starts with 80.1 seconds to live. That's longer than a US fly, or one from the Democratic Republic of Congo, but shorter than a South Korean or Japanese fly. It turns out to be useful having a longer life, because in each scenario you undertake, your fly has a bucket list.
While your time ticks down in the top corner of the screen, your job is to explore, discovering what you can interact with, and what everything does. Flying near items that help with your objectives pauses the timer, giving you unfettered moments to experiment and try out ideas, before resuming again when you leave their immediate airspace.
The process is a little less straightforward than it sounds, because bucket list entries are cryptic at best. For example, the second level includes: Build a home, Paint a masterpiece, Start a revolution, and Bring people together, on its 10 item list, which is quite a collection of tall orders to complete in under a minute and a half. Usefully, each level also includes ways to extend your time, which we wouldn't be churlish enough to spoil here.
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Broadly, Time Flies is divided into two asymmetric parts. In the first, you explore the set of rooms you're trapped in, finding things to do. Once you've discovered something you can interact with, you then need to work out what to do with it to cross off a bucket list activity. Once you've done that you'll need to continue exploring until you've found all 10 items, before figuring out which order to do them in for maximum time efficiency.
The second part of the game is an effective speed run, where you string all the activities together in a single life. All bucket lists include a goal specifying how your fly would like to die, so those will always be the final thing to strike off, and the order you take everything else is governed by its position in each room, and how those rooms connect to one another.
As well as the bucket list, there are jigsaw pieces hidden around each level. Some are easier to find than others, but all manage to highlight the diverse range of secret places Playables has managed to work into levels that on first impression look almost impossibly simple. The tension between the line drawn world with its single joystick interactions, and the need to conceal things within, makes for some fascinating subtlety in level design. More Trending
It's not all about subtlety though, as you can also expect a few buttocks and the censored genitalia of Michelangelo's David, which presumably why the pearl-clutchers at PEGI decided it should be rated 16. The game also squeezes in witty little tableaus to stumble upon, along with art and pop cultural references, and even more esoteric props.
It's also worth mentioning how well Time Flies mediates between its 2D side-scrolling gameplay and the line drawn 3D world on screen. Your single joystick motion proves to be intuitive and accurate, even when deciding whether to fly through a room or ascend a flight of stairs in the background. It's impressive stuff, that belies its outward simplicity.
Still, there's a lot less game here than console players will be used to. While it lasts, it's interesting and unusual, with impressive intrinsic rewards just messing about with its puzzles, before you get to the slightly more stressful speed run phase. It's a captivating piece of game design though and a world away from the current glut of overlong sequels and remakes.
In Short: A short, surreal roguelike puzzler that proves a video game doesn't have to be 60 hours long or feature photorealistic graphics to be entertaining and thought-provoking.
Pros: Witty, offbeat experience that continually confounds expectations. Intuitive single stick control works well and it manages to hide multiple secrets in its seemingly simplistic line drawn rooms.
Cons: Exploration and experimentation are more fun than the speed runs. A short game with no real replay value.
Score: 7/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PCPrice: £11.99Publisher: PanicDeveloper: PlayablesRelease Date: 31st July 2025
Age Rating: 16
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