Time Flies

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

Time Flies is a character-based Puzzle game released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players take the role of a fly who only has seconds left to live, who is aiming to scratch multiple entries off of a “bucket list” before its time is up.

The actual puzzles here come in the form of how you interpret the various puzzles. For example, you might complete one entry, “learn an instrument”, by flying back and forth in front of a guitar, causing it to strum, while completing another, “make someone laugh”, by landing on a sleeping man’s foot, tickling him and making him giggle.

There’s some clever wordplay at work in some of these that really forces you to think about how to go about doing them. And while some are relatively realistic, others are bizarre or silly, such as one goal that requires collecting Mario-style coins, or a hidden secret that requires you to fly into a computer screen’s image. And sometimes you’ll find objects to interact with that are red herrings, doing nothing other than being a point of interest, such as a Jenga tower you can topple.

Time is a constant enemy in this game, and it is handled in a very bizarre manner. Before you start a run in the game, you select a location in the world. This doesn’t affect the gameplay, but does determine how much time you have before your fly dies of old age, with your time in seconds based on the years of average life expectancy recorded in said country (word to the wise: choose a Scandinavian country).

While flying around, your seconds will slip away, though when you get close to an object you can interact with, you’ll zoom in and time will freeze while you figure out how to interact with said object. You can also gain a bit more time by moving hands on clocks to push them back, a silly contrivance that’s appreciated. However, I can’t help but feel like this game would have been more enjoyable if it just did without the time limit altogether.

Players will try to tick off every “bucket list” item within a single run, and failing to do so any dying (whether due to old age catching up with you or interacting with something lethal like a sticky fly trap), will have you restart from the beginning, with your old fly corpses still present wherever they fell. This can be particularly frustrating when you’ve completed almost all of them, only to have your time run out and be forced to start from the beginning again.

Time Flies has a presentation that makes use of a simple cartoony black and white 2D pixel art style that works quite well for the odd tone of this game, with your fly’s erratic movements coming across as fairly genuine. However, a lot of the credit here goes to some absolutely amazing sound design, which not only conveys a good variety in your fly’s buzzing noises, but also the variety of environmental noises you encounter. In fact, there’s little music in this game, with what little you encounter generally being diegetic sounds, such as music playing on a TV or in a crowded party.

When it comes to complaints, my main issue is the arbitrary time constraints I mentioned earlier, but there’s also the lack of help for players who get stuck and can’t figure out what a particular bucket list item means. It benefits the game that there are no complex controls, so the answer is always to fly or walk somewhere, since that’s all you can do. However, those pesky time limits mean that you don’t have much liberty to explore or think through these riddles before your fly runs out of time and you’re forced to start over again.

Still, despite the frustration this forced time limit imposes on the game, Time Flies is still a truly delightful and original Puzzle game that pushes players to think in abstract and gives the player some truly creative puzzles to figure out. If you’re up for an unorthodox Puzzle game, I definitely think this one is worth a try.

tl;dr – Time Flies is a character-based Puzzle game where players take the role of a fly looking to cross items off of its bucket list. There’s some really clever puzzle design here as you try to figure out what each bucket list item means, though there’s added frustration here due to arbitrary time constraints However, this game’s charm and clever puzzles make it well worth checking out, especially if you crave something out of the ordinary.

Grade: B+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Johannes, Jaka, Jared Wark, Gabriel Coronad-Medina, Francis Obst, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}