Time Flies, but It Sinks, Too

By Garrett Martin | August 12, 2025 | 3:40pm

Video Games Features time flies

There’s a thing I can’t help doing that drives my wife crazy: comparing the amount of time between two historical events and today. You know, like “the time between the Beatles’ first and last albums is the same as between today and 2018.” Or “the time between today and Obama’s election is equal to the time between Obama’s election and Operation Desert Storm.” I don’t mean to annoy her, I don’t even realize I’m doing this most of the time, but I can’t help it. Time is the heaviest goddamned thing in the world and I am almost always thinking about it.

A fly doesn’t have any time for that. A fly doesn’t really have any time, period: the average adult fly gets two to four weeks before blinking out forever. That’s condensed even more in Time Flies, a new game where you play as a house fly, and where the length of a life is dictated by the average lifespan of whatever country you choose at the start of a game; for every year the average resident of America or Estonia or the Maldives gets, the game’s fly gets a second. This is a game where every session is a speed run; you start with just under a minute and a half, at best, and fly until you can’t.

You can add time, though, and in the most matter-of-fact way possible: your fly can push back the minute hand of any clock it sees, adding precious seconds to your playthrough. Conversely, you can also push the minute hand forward, if you want to have even less time to finish your fly business. Whether it’s a grandfather clock inside a house, one of those classic round beauties hanging on a museum wall, or just a small number used to keep time while cooking in the kitchen, you’ll be able to use it to reclaim a few valuable seconds for your stalwart young fly.

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Still, that time usually isn’t enough. Your fly has a lot to get done before it dies; all four of the game’s stages come with a bucket list that the fly wants to knock off before being knocked off. The goals aren’t always clear; they’re written like little riddles, and you’ll have to interpret them while flying around the level. The odds of crossing everything off a list during your first few plays of a new level are slim, as you’ll be using that time to just figure out what those goals actually are.

Time Flies

And that’s where those clocks really come in handy. You’ll need that extra time not just to fulfill that bucket list, but just to understand what it is you’re even supposed to do. Sometimes your fly might spend its entire life, complete with the extra 10 or so seconds it gets by rewinding the clock, just to crack the secret of one entry on its bucket list. Once you know exactly what to do, the challenge comes in pulling it all off in a single life span; you won’t just have to figure out how to complete these goals, but the fastest, most direct route in which to do so.

Life isn’t about doing things as quickly and as directly as you can, though. One of the tragedies of time, one of the things that makes it so heavy, is that most of us are really bad at how we use it. I definitely am; the amount of time I spend doing literally nothing, just laying or sitting as still as possible while blankly staring at irrelevant nonsense on my phone, would probably be staggering, if that hadn’t become the default setting for most people. When I was younger, before smartphones and an always-on, lightning fast internet, time could stretch on interminably, to the point where I kept accumulating new hobbies and new things to do in hopes of filling it. 25 years ago when I bought an instrument I’d actually learn how to play it, get some use out of it, justify the expense; today I might strum it a few times over several years, maybe buy an instructional DVD that will still be shrinkwrapped three years later, and never get anywhere close to good enough to actually record anything with it or play it live. There was a time where I did a ton and still had time for more. Today I do almost nothing outside of work and yet mourn how little time I seem to have in which to do that nothing.

I might get 80 years. A fly might get a month. The fly in Time Flies gets 80 seconds. That’s a huge gulf but there’s less space between us than you might think. In Time Flies I rush to accomplish my fly’s obtuse, esoteric, completely trivial goals before it literally drops dead. In life I hardly ever rush for anything anymore—outside of in games like Time Flies. My fly’s trivial goals are my trivial goals, and some of the only ones I know I’ll actually accomplish. In the amount of time since I started checking off everything on that fly’s bucket list, I haven’t even attempted to take care of anything on my own. .

Time’s all we’ve got, and even when it feels like we’ve got some to kill, ultimately we’ll all wind up with less than we need—and not even make good use of what we do have. Even if I could get some more by simply moving back the clock, like the fly does in Time Flies, I’m sure I’d just spend that with a glazed-over daze directed at the internet. So give me a good 80 seconds, just a breakneck burst where I do as much as I possibly can in the blip of a moment in which I have to do it—because, as Time Flies understands, the only time we really value time is when we know we have almost none of it left.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.