You Have 78 Seconds To Complete Your Bucket List In Time Flies – Aftermath

The average life expectancy of a person in the United States is 78.4 years. So, Time Flies developer Playables has given me 78.4 seconds to play a round of its game; any second longer and the fly I’m playing as will suddenly drop from the air and splat right to the ground. If you’re playing Time Flies from Japan, you’re given a little extra time: 84 seconds, because the life expectancy of a person in Japan is 84 years. If you’re playing from Somalia, where the average life expectancy of a person is 54 years, you’re starting from a disadvantage, because your fly only has 54 seconds to buzz around, completing bucket list tasks like start a revolution, build a house, and bring people together.

“We started working on the project at the end of the pandemic,” Time Flies game designer Michael Frei told Aftermath. “We had already been looking at the World Health Organization data all the time already. There was this idea to take life expectancy data, so you have to do everything in one lifetime.”

The goal of Time Flies is to complete esoteric items on a bucket list as you control a fly in its brief time on Earth. These are things like learning an instrument, finding beauty in the world, and trusting someone—human tasks that aren’t necessarily easy to accomplish, but doable. It’s a little bit harder for a fly that has around a minute to live. 

The studio converted the life expectancy of humans in years to seconds—it’s both more thrilling a challenge and more akin to the short lifespan of the pesky fly. Time Flies begins by setting the life expectancy for the player; mine is automatically set to the United States, where I live and am playing from. But you can cheat the game a bit, Frei said, if you’re looking to make things easier or more difficult, by changing your location to another country. If you make a mistake—say, flying through a lit candle—or run out of time, the buzzing stops. The fly’s dead. 

 “A big part of the game is exploring spaces,” game designer and programmer Raphaël Munoz told Aftermath. 

Time Flies is best played with a controller, using a joystick to push around the pixelized fly on the screen. First and foremost, Time Flies is about experimentation.

The cryptic bucket list items provide some sort of guidance to the player, but the game is best approached with a sense of curiosity. What happens if I land in this glass full of wine? My bucket list has getting drunk, after all. But landing in the wine glass is the wrong move; my fly has tragically drowned. The game restarts, reviving me at the life expectancy settings, where I choose an option and go ahead. I notice a drip besides the wine glass, which is a much more manageable puddle of liquid for a fly. Slurp up the droplet of wine and the fly’s got the wobbles. 

In another instance, set in the museum, the fly buzzes past a crumble of pills etched with happy faces. Nibble on the crumbs and the fly’s taking a trip, represented by a disorienting kaleidoscope effect that Munoz said is one of his favorite little moments in the game—and it also adds a bit of an extra challenge to navigate the museum. (For Frei, his favorite piece is the finding God bucket list item, which requires the fly to bounce around a video game controller’s buttons.)

Once all the bucket list items are checked off in however many runs, Time Flies shifts into something else. It’s almost a speedrunning simulator, about remembering and flying through the bucket list items within a short lifespan.

Playables wanted the player to be able to create a visualization of the space in their minds, something that’s complex but not dizzying, because the player has to be able to remember and complete all bucket list tasks in just over a minute. The time allotted for delighting in the ways in which animated toes wiggle when tickled or the satisfying bzzzzt when a fly fries against a light bulb is brief. Time of the essence, because in Time Flies, you know exactly how fleeting life is.

Despite the visual simplicity of the game—Frei said he drew the black-and-white game largely using a mouse, his laptop trackpad, and only occasionally an iPad—Time Flies has a dynamic environment full of charming little secrets. That’s because the humble fly is not so much the main character of Time Flies.

 “In my work so far, I focused on the character,” Frei said. “There were usually no backgrounds at all, so the world was usually in an empty space. This time, it’s the opposite. The character has not much that he carries, but the world is the character.”

Time Flies‘ bucket list doesn’t inspire the same existential crisis within me that the everyday bucket list often does; common bucket list items are often big, lofty goals to complete before death. It’s stuff like traveling to far off places, jumping out of planes, writing a book, paying off debts, falling in love, swimming with sharks. Big, overwhelming goals that create anxiety within me instead of inspiration—abstract ideas that stop me in my tracks instead of push me forward. 

Time Flies uses the conceptual nature of these big ideas—starting a revolution, bringing people together, getting rich—and makes them fly-sized. Often, these goals, like starting a revolution or bringing people together, are literal: running, hamster-style, on a wheel to make it move or using the force of an electric wheelchair to push two statues together to make them kiss.

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