REVIEW: Time Flies makes the most of its short life

Listen. I'm in my thirties and five years into this VGG endeavor. And one of the things that hangs over my head the most in 2025 is the idea of how I spend my time. Where I’m headed, how each minute I spend is getting me there, and generally high levels of existential drama about time, legacy, and life.

Normal stuff for a guy who spends most of his time writing about video games.

Well, leave it to a 1-bit pixel art abstract puzzle game about doing silly things as a fly to put those anxieties into perspective and even find some ways to ease them. That's what Playables' latest existential silly puzzle thinker offers: Time Flies, a game about a fly checking off its bucket list with the minimal time it has.

​Just the Facts

Developer: Playables

Publisher: Panic

​Platform(s): PC*, PS5, Nintendo Switch *denotes platform reviewed on

​Price: $14.99

Release Date: July 31, 2025

Review key provided by publisher via popagenda.

Time Flies is the latest game from Playables, a production company based in Zurich, best known for a series of abstract and oddly beautiful interactive experiences — both games and websites — that share a few simple things in common. 1) They usually share a monochromatic art style, and 2) They usually abstract out a simple concept about the human experience into minimalist puzzlers. It started with 2015's Plug & Play and carried through into 2019's Kids, two critically lauded interactive experiences all about human interaction.

We met and interviewed the team at PAX last year, and you get the sense that the people working at this studio see the world a little bit differently than we do — and through these games, allow us access to their perspective for a short time.

In Time Flies, it's all about making the most of the time you have in this world. Buzzing around as a humble fly, your playable life is tied directly to real-world life expectancy data, translating a region's human lifespan in years into seconds for your fly. While the game may start tied to your actual location, you can hop around to experiment with the lifespans of nations across the globe.

For example, popping in with a USA fly means having 76.4 seconds to accomplish things in your life, versus buzzing around as a Japan fly, which has 84.5 seconds to live. The list of countries you can pick from is fairly comprehensive, and it's quite the education to pick and poke at different nations and see how vastly different the life expectancy is across regions and nations.

Once you've locked in your lifespan, your little fly has one thing on its mind: fulfilling its bucket list, however possible. Across Time Flies' four unique chapters, your fly will buzz through four different environments, knocking out some stereotypical bucket list items before time is up.

Its goals range from "go on tour" to "learn a musical instrument" to "start a revolution" and dozens more. Your task is to fly around — brushing up against, landing on, and experimenting with different objects spread across the buildings. I'll avoid mentioning specifics or solutions, but all of these fun little puzzles offer clever interpretations of simple life goals that never fail to bring a smile to your face.

Each fly's minute-long story is both an affirmation of how fulfilling life can be when you just go out and explore and try things and a reminder that accepting the joy in what you can accomplish, instead of striving for unobtainable grandeur, can make for a life worth living. It's a great testament to doing away with what ifs and instead embracing what's right in front of you and making the most of it.

Can you tell I've been going through it?

It's mostly silly, and it's definitely more about the journey than it is the destination, but there are worthwhile lessons to be learned in Playable's short buzzle adventure. (Get it? Buzz? Puzzle? Buzzle? I've got hundreds more articles like this you can read right here, folks.)

These fun little puzzles offer clever interpretations of simple life goals that never fail to bring a smile to your face.

What makes Time Flies especially special is its approachability. Buzzing around as a fly is, as you'd expect, a simple life, with simple gameplay to match. Push your analog stick, use WASD, or use your arrow keys — and just fly. Got no extra buttons to worry about. Got no fancy inventories to maintain. Just check your bucket list, fly into the world, and figure out fun ways to make your dreams a reality before you die. It's the kind of game I would have been obsessed with as a kid, and I think it's an easy game to put in any person's hands to show them the simple power of the medium.

The only way you progress in Time Flies is by accomplishing everything on your bucket list in one life. It makes for a frantic experience, buzzing to and fro as you first spend your lives scouting out how to, say, "explore your sexuality" as a fly. Then once you've got a good sense about how to tick off everything in your bucket list, it's about making the perfect path through the world to accomplish them all in the handful of seconds you've been given.

The constantly ticking clock reminds you that time is running out — that the countdown has no care for how little or how much you've accomplished in your life. And then you die. Just to do it again and again until you pull off a life that fulfills you in every way you'd hoped. That's the game: a little interactive sandbox, driven by a constant timer and silly bits of dry humor.

Your appreciation of the team's humor and your investment in buzzing about will equally match your enjoyment level of the project. But if getting into insectoid mischief sound like fun — if piecing together some cheeky puzzle solutions and living life to the fullest speaks to your sensibilities — then Time Flies offers plenty for you.

With the minute-plus-change that you get in each life, and the full runtime of the game just around two hours, Time Flies is an extremely digestible game, whether you play in tiny segments or all at once. The timer can grow annoying, and once you figure out which country has the longest lifespan, there's little incentive to change off of it unless you're going for a heightened challenge (I didn't), but the conceit is fun. And even when it grows tiresome, Playables manages to do a lot to respect your time. For one, there are tons of sneaky ways to add time to your fly's life: either by nabbing random pickups in the world, like coins that help you "get rich," or by actually wrestling back the hands of the clocks you encounter in the world. The more time you add, the less stress you'll have trying to hit the perfect path to end-of-life happiness. Once again, normal video game stuff.

They also make sure to speed up some of the slower tasks in every run after you've found them, ensuring the fun of an otherwise hectic experience isn't squashed by decelerating tasks when you've got to do them repeatedly. For example, playing a video game as a fly requires you to move something across the screen very slowly — but it's sped up exponentially every time after your first encounter.

These small things that could have been left on the drawing room floor give Time Flies that nice sheen of polish that Playables frequently seems to nail.

Playables creates an incredible sense of scale for their game's environments. Time Flies often draws the camera back until your fly is just a single pixel while you're exploring the space — only to zoom all the way in once you approach interactive objects in the world. In that way, Time Flies certainly manages to emphasize that relatable existential nightmare of being insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

The monochromatic 1-bit pixel art is extremely effective. It showcases the game's straightforward puzzle design, where things are presented to you plainly and it's up to your imagination to consider the ways everyday items might be used to accomplish abstract things. The consistency, the simplicity, the minimalism. In a gaming world that perpetually gets populated with busier user interfaces and painted with buckets of complex particle effects, seeing something painted in stark black and white, with simple pixel line art, is a bit of a refuge.

Things are presented to you plainly and it's up to your imagination to consider the ways everyday items might be used to accomplish abstract things.

That modesty carries through into Time Flies' soundscape, too, with the perfectly tuned fly buzzing being your one constant in an otherwise empty environment. You'll also encounter subtle foley work for the glass you push along the floor, or the BZZT that accompanies your fly's electronic death when you fly into a lightbulb: things that ground you in the space and don't much intrude otherwise. A game like this could have overdone it in the presentation department — quirky soundtrack, big bombastic visual effects when you accomplish each bucket list item, maybe even an inner monologue for the fly. But Playables keeps it reserved, and Time Flies is all the more interesting for it. And the brief moments where they disrupt the norm, visually or aurally, stand out even more as a result.

Even as someone who finds video games to be an incredibly worthwhile way to spend my time, I find myself falling victim to the "Is it long enough? Is it too long?" ruminating that plagues the industry today. As I've gotten older, that conversation has shifted, though. If it was two hours or two hundred, I didn't care. It's more about how the time spent felt. We've only got so much of it, after all.

And even as it brought a newly heightened sense of my own ever-ticking life clock, I found that Time Flies was time well spent.

Video Games Are Good and Time Flies is . . . GREAT. (8.5/10)

+ simple but effective presentation style, clever ways to puzzle out deeper life goals, incredibly approachable little adventure

- if simple and silly isn't enough, this isn't for you, time gimmick loses its sheen over time, flies are annoying irl

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