Life is short, and we should make the most of our time on this planet. That is the thesis of Time Flies, the latest game from Kids developer Playables. You take control of a common housefly, with the objective of completing your bucket list before your shockingly short life is up. This results in a frantic dash to complete your goals in a single run. Though I relished in each moment of discovery and lived for the run where I put together all of my learnings to complete the checklist, the game’s lifespan is nearly as short as the titular character’s.
Time Flies drops you into environments you might typically find flies – houses, sewers, and even a museum – and requires you to complete tasks described in abstract ways. For example, the list may say, “Make Someone Laugh” or “Leave Your Mark,” with no further explanation. Instead, the player is left to their own devices to figure out what each cryptic clue means. For example, “Make Someone Laugh” requires you to find a sleeping person and walk on the soles of their feet to tickle them.
The catch is that, as a fly, you have a very short lifespan; the game takes the average human lifespan in years from the country you choose at the start, based on World Health Organization data, and converts it to seconds. This means that if you choose Japan, you get 84.5 seconds, while other countries may have lower life expectancies. Thankfully, once you get into the puzzle or activity, time stops to allow for precision movement without the ever-present countdown. If you find a clock, you can also recharge your timer by rewinding the hands.
Cracking each puzzle is rewarding, but the true excitement comes with trying to complete all the bucket-list items in one fly’s lifespan. The simple controls, which only involve guiding your fly with no button presses outside of bringing up the list, allow the emphasis to be placed on the puzzles and challenges themselves. Once you crack a puzzle, it doesn’t take long before you can chain them all together to complete the entire list in one run. Piecing together the puzzles and figuring out the optimized path adds an approachable speedrunning-lite element to the experience, and it’s a thrill to get through every item in one go. However, I did have a few runs spoiled by sometimes finicky mechanics related to navigating to a different level of a house; since there are no tutorials, it took me until the end of the game to learn how to traverse floors reliably.
Once you accomplish the feat of completing every list item in one run, you unlock the next level. I enjoyed repeating the process of interpreting each abstract checklist item across Time Flies’ four levels, but since it took me around just 30 runs to complete the entire game, the experience was over just as I started feeling at home with the mechanics and puzzle conventions. This could be interpreted as an additional level of meta-commentary on the fleeting nature of life, and there is something to be said about a game not overstaying its welcome, but I was left yearning for more.
Outside of the main goals, you can tackle optional overarching achievements, which are often spelled out equally as cryptically as the stage-specific bucket-list items. But aside from gathering 12 puzzle pieces that are tucked away in various off-the-beaten-path corners of the stages, I didn’t feel the pull to complete these achievements the way I felt compelled to check off each mainline list item.
The final stage and subsequent cutscene serve as a culmination of everything you’ve learned and accomplished, evoking a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality for the extremely brief journey presented in Time Flies. Although this aptly showcases the title’s core message of how quickly life passes by, similar to how people have often expressed when their time is up, it all goes by so fast, and I was left wishing for just a bit longer.