Time Flies – PS5 Review

Time Flies is a puzzle game from Swiss-based developers Playable and it’s quite unlike anything we’ve played before.  The game sees you playing as a fly that has to try to complete a list of goals in its meagre lifespan before it dies.  But if that sounds like a bad premise for a game, what elevates things is the heart that the developers have put into it, even if your first impressions might not be all that favourable.

Upon launching the game, you’ll be presented with a list of nations.  These are based on the World Health  Organisation’s data about average life expectancies for flies.  Yes, really.  The most you can get is 84 seconds, courtesy of Japan, but some of the lower ones are around sixty seconds.  You’ll want to avoid them.

You begin the game in a house and all you can do is walk and fly.  There are no other actions you can perform and so it’s then just a case of seeing how you can interact with the world.  To guide you is a list of actions, very much a human-style bucket list with actions, both practical and whimsical, to achieve.  From learning an instrument (which just involves flying across the strings of a guitar to strum it), reading a book (crawling all over an open page), bringing people together (using an electric wheelchair to push two statues closer) and various other goals, this all involves figuring out how to approach and object to perform the action.

To progress through the game’s four stages you’ll need to complete that level’s bucket list completely and with that short lifespan ticking away, you’ll need to work out the best approach.  Thankfully, when you’re activating a goal, the timer freezes and also there are ways to turn back time too (these generally involve flying up to a clock and pushing the seconds hand backwards).  And this is where the game started to win us over.

There’s a nice bit of creativity in the goals, a little humour and some gentle lateral thinking required.  It’s not a hard game to finish at all, and you can expect to get through the main campaign in a couple of hours, but there are also some additional puzzles in there.  The game’s trophy set has a few things in there that you’ll need to figure out and there are twelve jigsaw pieces to collect and finding those did have us tearing our hair out at one point but it was all an enjoyable challenge and nothing too obscure (even if we’re the only people to have maxed out the trophies so far).

And so, in the end we really enjoyed this one.  Even if we didn’t think we would.  The initial problem is just the presentation.  The game uses a monochrome, pixelated graphics style that’s not particularly attractive.  It reminded us of the old ZX Spectrum games Andy Capp and Garfield.  But the roughness of the visuals does end up being part of the game’s charm and it does help the gameplay thanks to it all being quite sparse.  It’s a little easier to spot anything that might be something you should interact with.

In the end, Time Flies ended up being very enjoyable.  You’ll ruin it if you use a guide though.  That’d take out all the fun of the game and then you’d just be left with the ancient visuals and gameplay where you are, ultimately, just playing as a few pixels that knock things over.  But if you can get past how ordinary it all looks, you’ll find a game that’s actually a lot less ordinary than you might think.