Time Flies review – existential flight game with a bittersweet buzz

PC, Mac, PS5, Nintendo Switch; Playables/Panic
Clever puzzler has you freely buzzing around trying to quickly achieve all your bucket list activities while avoiding sharp or gooey life-ending hazards

The death of a housefly is usually an unceremonious event. Within minutes of the insect's appearance in our periphery, a tide of annoyance rises, and with the quick thwap of a swatter or rolled-up magazine, the bug is gone. Time Flies, a perception-warping bug puzzler, reimagines this inevitably short lifespan as an absurd tragedy - by providing the soon-to-perish pest with a bucket list.

Over the course of roughly a minute, players freely buzz around minimalist 2D environments in an effort to make those last wishes come true. The fly's dreams arrive as vague, far-ranging clues such as make someone laugh", find God", start a revolution" and get rich", and it's your job to ricochet around the space until you land, often literally, on a clarifying and usually funny realisation. Similar to Coal Supper's satirical side-scroller, Thank Goodness You're Here!, Time Flies relies wholly on experimentation and intuition to understand the world around you, rather than explicit quest markers or info dumps.