Time Flies when you’re thinking about dying

In 76.4 seconds, my life will end. 

So long as I manage to avoid lightbulbs or stay out of wine glasses, the buzzing will inevitably give way to silence. My wings will abruptly stop flapping and I’ll careen towards the ground like an asteroid. I’ll become a speck on a rug, a bit of debris absent-mindedly vacuumed up by someone who has no idea what adventures I’ve been on in the past minute. It won’t be a great tragedy; that’s just a fact of life for a common house fly.

That hard truth is the basis for Time Flies, the latest game from Kids developer Playables, out July 31 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC. The minimalist insect life sim puts players in control of a fly who only has so many seconds to fulfill a bucket list of tasks before passing away. It’s a clever micro-adventure in the vein of Minit (a game in which each life only lasts 60 seconds) that’s all about learning to make the most of a short lifespan. Though it may be centered around the Animal Kingdom’s most forgettable pest, Time Flies cuts deep as an interactive meditation on the limited time every fragile creature has in this world.

Time Flies lands a gut punch before you can even start playing it. Before I get to buzz around, I’m asked to pick what country I’m in. That answer determines how long my fly’s lifespan is based on the average human life expectancy rate of the country selected, translated from years to seconds. If I set my location to Japan, I’ll be able to live for 84.5 seconds. If I pick Chad, I’m basically choosing to play on hard mode as I’ll only have 59.1 seconds to fulfill my dreams. It’s an immediate sign that Playables isn’t just in it for a gimmick.

Once I make my choice, I’m dropped into a hand-drawn house and given a to-do list. Make friends, learn an instrument, get drunk, and so on. My goal isn’t just to figure out how to accomplish each task with my limited skill set (basically just flying), but how to manage the little time that I have so I can do them all in one go. Each of the four levels – which take me from a museum to a sewer – is a routing puzzle where I’m mapping out the most efficient way to navigate the maze of 2D screens.

My short adventures flip between gallows humor and life-affirming moments of joy. Sometimes my life ends prematurely when I fly too close to a candle. Other times I survive into old age having tripped on ecstasy or exploring my sexuality by buzzing around nude sculptures. And then there are the sobering moments. Those are the runs where I’m so close to doing everything I want to do, but fall from the sky right before I reach the toilet paper roll I yearned to climb on. If only I had a few more seconds.

I’ve been thinking about dying recently.

No, maybe that’s not quite right. It’s more that I’ve been thinking about living. 

Ever since January, I’ve been dealing with a rough series of events that have siphoned my energy. A worsening political climate dovetailed with a challenging chapter of my career, a combination that ate up all available real estate in my brain. I began to feel powerless, and then paralyzed. I couldn’t get myself out to a movie theater. I could barely put together a few chords on guitar. I didn’t want to travel, or go to parties, or leave my couch at all. My world grew smaller and smaller until I felt like an insect buzzing towards an inevitable end. Surely something would snuff me out soon enough.

I have been on my own mundane odyssey in recent months, dodging fly ribbons and mounting credit card debt in search of a safe landing. It was only once I found a sturdy wall to cling against – right around my 36th birthday – that I began to reckon with a wasted seven months. There are still so many things that I’d like to accomplish in my life. I want to write a book. I want to record a punk record. I want to help rehabilitate birds eventually, pioneering the “writing about Donkey Kong to wildlife conservation” pipeline. 

Those seven months amounted to 184 million seconds of lost time that I could have spent making my life more fulfilling. That’s nearly two and a half million digital fly corpses piled up on the carpet.

There’s a grim read of Time Flies. You can see it as a nihilistic game about how we’re all going to be snapped out of existence one day no matter what we do. If the lightbulbs don’t get us, the old age will. We’re all flies hopelessly trying to buzz louder than a grandfather clock’s hourly chime. But I see something more optimistic amid the heap of slapstick insect deaths. Time Flies is about being undeterred by life’s limitations. It’s about setting existential despair aside and experiencing as much as you can, leaving no bucket list item unchecked. 

It’s about life, not death.

I have a running test that I use to determine if I’m going to continue spending my time playing a video game. Whenever I hit a roadblock that leaves me feeling like I’m wasting my time, I say “I’m going to die one day” out loud. It has never steered me wrong. If I’ve spent three hours bashing my head against a hard Souls boss, I utter that phrase and see where my reflexes lead me. If I shut down the game without a second thought, I know that I could be making better use of my time.

When I said “I’m going to die one day” in the middle of my brisk two hours with Time Flies, the game answered back. “I know,” it practically told me. I kept buzzing undeterred, taking my time to fulfill each fly’s bucket list items until the end credits decided that it was finally time for me to go. 

I don’t regret a second of it.

Time Flies will be released July 31 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Switch using a prerelease download code provided by Panic. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.