TIME FLIES
Developer Michael Frei, Raphaël Munoz Publisher Playables Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch Release 2023
The very first thing Time Flies does on startup is ask which country you call home. Not to cue up the appropriate user agreement or anything of that nature, but so it can assign you the current lifespan. In the UK’s case that’s 81.2 seconds, one for each year of our life expectancy. But there’s no time to dwell on that, because the fly you’re embodying has an enormous house to explore and a bucket list of goals to tick off. What follows is something like Untitled Goose Game through the lens of a Flash game, with the lo-fi presentation and acidic sense of humour you’d expect from the latter half of that equation. Spotting “get drunk” on the list, we head straight for a glass of wine, only to drown in it. Onto the next fly, then. Maybe this time we’ll lie and say we’re from Japan – the higher life expectancy there should buy us a few extra seconds.