Time Bandit is Animal Crossing.
Time Bandit is Metal Gear Solid.
Time Bandit is Sokoban.
Time Bandit takes all these things and reshapes them into new forms through their interaction with each other.
At its core, Time Bandit has a simple premise. You've been hired to push blocks around in a facility for your boss. Your boss is kind of unpleasant but dealing with that is just part of the job, you figure. You set up your forklift to push the first block in your puzzle solving adventure and immediately the premise begins to wrinkle.
It takes 30 minutes to push this block one tile. Realtime. What do you do during that? The answer is... leave work. Maybe you'll wander the town. Or maybe you'll just.... go home and sleep. Close the game. Do something else. That block doesn't need you there. It'll be pushed when you come back.
The developer states in the IGF notes that they were inspired by a period - assumably early in the pandemic - where they decided to check in on their Animal Crossing village every 15 minutes, talking to the villagers and walking along the beach - how this developed into a routine that became a significant part of their life. And that that feeling is what they wanted to bring to an explicitly anticapitalist sim game. How does the way that you reflect on mechanics, narrative, themes, change when extended over a lengthy period of time? How do your actions have impact or not? How do you CHOOSE to define what the time you spend is like?
And so when a Solid Snake pastiche climbs out of the water to tell you that it's time to start stealing from your boss - accompanied by a lecture on the basics of maxist labor theory - of course you're going to get on board. Of course you're going to start crawling, shimmying, and climbing through what had previously been safe and relatively straightforward areas, as your boss introduces explicit shift times that randomize every day - not playing at the right time? Shift hours too early or too late for your real-time schedule? Time to sneak into work instead of walking in. And, surreally, just like animal crossing, you will slowly get to learn the schedules of the robot sentries and security cameras that you dodge around as you work to extricate your stolen loot - because those, too, have schedules that change throughout the day. Eventually it begins to feel less like stealth and more like a dance. I know where you are, and where you'll be. And I can slip past with ease.
What this all culminates in is a game that is unlike anything I've ever played. The faux-PS1 aesthetics are executed to eerie perfection, giving the city and mines a quiet off-ness that perfectly compliments the off-ness of a setting where you're the only worker in an abandoned mining town. The look is subtle but striking - the strange way objects wrinkle and contort in the first-person view. The way the unused streetlights sway and swing in the wind as the weather changes. The quiet way in which your bed in your apartment does not quite match the perspective of the floor. This place is wrong, and you are here.
You communicate with your companions - an curious IT worker, a lonely shopkeeper, and the snake pastiche himself - via a radio that makes no pretensions at being anything but a codec. They give you hints, story background, and otherwise just keep you company in the lonely act of solving puzzles. And what an act that solving is.
Time Bandit is uncompromising. There is no undo. There is no reset. There is only the knowledge that every move you make will take a full half hour in realtime. Eventually you may buy more forklifts, so you can make more moves at once. Additional wrinkles come into play. New ways to deal with obstacles. My favourite, perhaps, is the Flamethrower. With this tool and 5 gallons of fuel - not a cheap amount at the poor wages you're paid - you can incinerate some block types entirely, destroying them. The cost is substantial; the fumes create a poison gas cloud that harms your health, and recovering health is no mean feat in this game, timewise or financially. But here's the rub.
That cloud sticks around forever.
Forever ever. The decision to use a flamethrower is permanent, and with level design as intertwined as this game's is, the decision to use it creates consequences that can last you weeks, months, who knows how long as you loop back through the same corridors and passageways. Will that cloud you created to save a little time come back to haunt you? Perhaps you'll spend some time considering it a little more.
Everything in the game is like this. When time is such a valuable resource, everything becomes significantly more worth thinking-through. I find myself standing there, staring at block puzzles, planning out moves in advance, because 10 minutes spent in consideration is worth significantly more than a wasted 30 minute push. And the game constantly introduces new ideas that surprised me, even as someone who's played my share of block pushing games. Not just pushing multiple blocks in a row, or the interplay with compressing trash so it's pushable, but hidden crawlways you'll want to scout out in advance - because they can save you huge amounts of work. Complex multi-entrance puzzles that'll have you dodging through a separate part of the complex to get at both sides of a block. The game is extremely carefully designed so that there's no one solution to any puzzle, and thoughtful consideration can lead to all kinds of unusual (and satisfying) results.
I'm so excited about this game. I can't stop playing it. It is unique and bold and weird in ways that are exactly what I love about indie games, and I really deeply hope you take the chance to try it out too when it releases. These kinds of things are absolutely what I participate in IGF for and what make me excited about games as a whole.
Thanks for reading.
