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One of the weirder games revealed at this year’s Summer Game Fest was undoubtedly Time flies. At first glance, it looks like a humble time management game where you explore a house and try to complete as many goals as you can before dying. Each run lasts between one and two minutes.

But the whimsical music of the reveal trailer belies the nihilistic catchphrase that appears at the end like a microphone being put down: “You’re a fly. Your life is short. Make the most of the time you have. Because we’re all going to die.” ”

“I was interested in having a fly as something pointless, almost annoying,” Swiss designer and animator Michael Frei, half of the game’s development team (along with programmer Raphaël Munoz), told me. “And to do something meaningful like a fly in the world with a bucket list […] I think that’s something we ask ourselves every day, like, ‘What’s meaningful to me? What should I do with my life?’”

In Time flies, you take control of a fly in a minimally drawn world that, in the demo we played, consisted of several rooms in a house or apartment. As you explore each room, opportunities arise to check items off the fly’s bucket list, while trying to avoid an abrupt end to the beast’s already short life. The fly dreams of getting drunk before dying; dip your head into the waiting wine glass and you’ll drown, but get out next to the drop on the table next to it and your list gets one item shorter. Exploring the house while finding the right interactivity points creates a simplistic yet fun gameplay loop that will no doubt inspire players to find the fastest routes to complete as many objectives as possible in one lifetime.

Frei said that’s one way to play, although just like in real life, fluttering around and dying without achieving a single meaningful goal is just as valid.

“I think in the end it’s up to the player,” he said.

A housefly flies away from an acoustic guitar in a screenshot from Time Flies

Image: Michael Frei, Raphaël Munoz/Playables

There’s another wrinkle: Your allotted playing time varies based on your geographic location. The game checks your IP address against a list of life expectancies by country and then allocates you an equal number of seconds. Players in countries with better health care and less pollution will have a few more seconds to explore before their fly drops dead from old age.

“You know, depending on where you live, you’re more or less lucky in life,” noted Frei, who lives in Switzerland – a country with one of the highest life expectancies in the world.

Time flies seems much less abstract than Frei’s previous games, Plug & Play (2015) and Children (2019), which are more like interactive short films in which figures are pushed, pulled and prodded through tight black-and-white environments. Time flies is his first project with something akin to traditional gameplay mechanics or goals. That’s not to say you’ll level up your fly’s skill trees, but it’s an evolution nonetheless.

visually, Time flies was inspired by Glider, an old Mac game. “It was the first video game I ever played, on my father’s Mac Classic, the first Mac you could buy in Switzerland,” Frei recalls.

The original idea that turned into Time flies was a browser extension that created annoying buzzing flies around website elements that were tracking you. He also considered having the titular character be a single pixel rather than an actual animated fly. It seems like every slightly recognizable element of the game has been sculpted from the clay of a stranger, less accessible idea, and the result is something we can’t quite predict. Frei said there are facets of the game that he has not yet shown and will not discuss.

“I’m lucky in a way that I can do projects on my own terms, which I think is a great privilege,” he said. Every project he’s done has barely funded the next. “I have creative freedom,” he continued. “I don’t have to meet anyone’s expectations. And that’s interesting to me.

“Also to play with the expectations of the audience. That is always quite interesting.”

As part of their research, the developers examined what people usually put on real bucket lists. “That was a very depressing undertaking, because most people who publish their bucket list online, these bucket lists are more about bragging rights than meaningfulness,” Frei said. “I don’t have a bucket list. I just hope I don’t have too many regrets when I die.”

Time flies is expected to be released in 2023 on Mac, Nintendo Switch and Windows PC.