This minimalistic indie game is from devs Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz. It launched in early August 2025 and is available on PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch 2.
In this one, you take control of a fly and have 80.1 seconds to complete a bucket list of challenges. Its minimalistic art style is intriguing and there are some nifty things going on here, but is it something to buzz about? Let’s see.
Let’s Get in a Flap About Time Flies
The game is about death. You take control of your fly and have four levels to explore, with the emphasis on critical thinking to explore various areas of a home you’ve invaded.
You buzz around, tick off things on your fly’s bucket list (such as tickling a human’s foot and making them laugh), then buzz about your way. You have to think fast to do what you can in 80 seconds.
There are various things that can kill you along the way, such as:
- Fly traps
- Alcohol
- An electric fan
- Time itself
If you die, you start the game again as a new fly. You will die a lot, but the goal is to complete the bucket list, explore new areas, and enjoy the existential black humour.
Time Flies is very much part of the jerk animal genre of games created by the popular Untitled Goose Game (2019).
Thrown into that is a mishmash of the Minit (2018 ) concept where you have 60 seconds to explore as much of your world as possible. Time Flies throws in the element of dark humour throughout that, with your fly destined to die—sometimes horribly, other times through reaching old age and just flopping over.
Players get about an hour of gameplay here, which for the £11 asking price is a bit excessive.
That wouldn’t bother us much if we’d enjoyed the game more, but unfortunately we just didn’t take to Time Flies very much. Some of the puzzle solving moments made us smile, there’s a reference to David Cronenberg’s terrifying The Fly (1986) in the form of a bedroom poster, and that kind of thing.
We’ve seen plenty of other players say they’ve enjoyed the game, but for us there wasn’t much to do. It’s a no from us, then, but with that caveat of plenty of other people enjoying its minimalistic take on being an annoying insect.
