I have deleted my save file in Time Bandit and started a new game three times now. I keep messing up and missing a very, very important appointment with a strange figure in scuba gear who wants to meet in secret. Fourth time’s the charm – I wake up early and make my appointment. Finally, I can get back to work.
Developer Joel Jordon pitched me on covering Time Bandit for this column months ago, based on my known love for a similarly real-time game, The Longing. Time Bandit exists within the same very small genre of games that take place in real-time, but which also are not endless in the way that Animal Crossing or certain mobile games are – it’s a story that plays out, minute-by-minute, as you go. You play as a worker in a factory tasked with mining mysterious objects called Time Crystals, most of which are hidden throughout the facility behind minecarts, rubble, and other obstacles. Your job is to use your trusty forklift and other tools to remove the obstacles one by one and collect them for the company. Simple, yes?
But it’s not. First off, the forklift (and all other tools) take both energy and time to use. Energy can only be replenished by returning to your apartment and sleeping for hours, which is convenient because your tools need minutes, even hours to finish moving a single obstacle at a time. Tools are also powered by fuel, which you have to pay for out of pocket using wages you earn once per real-time day. All this means that Time Bandit is largely a game where you open it up, collect your wages, buy fuel, set your forklift and other tools to start their respective tasks, and then go back to sleep and shut the game off while you wait.
Describing Time Bandit is like describing a farm sim full of chores, in that it sounds deeply tedious but in reality is compelling. Some of that I can chalk up to its haunting, Metal Gear-inspired, PS1-era aesthetic luring me in with striking shots like the one of the city center clock tower. But most of my fascination stemmed from the game’s narrative context. Early on, the aforementioned scuba fellow accosted me outside the factory and asked me for a secret meeting at a time of my choosing the next day. I was urged, repeatedly, not to miss it. I never found out what happened if I did – I was too worried about upsetting him, so I restarted the game all three times I missed it. When I did eventually make the meeting, I was told about the factory’s true motivations, and the real power of the Time Crystals I was mining for them. Armed with new knowledge, I now had a choice as to what I did with those crystals, a mission centered around the value of time and labor, and the ability to commit, yes, literal time theft from the game’s 1%.
Speaking with Jordon over coffee at GDC, I immediately see how they ended up making a game about fairly heavy, anti-capitalist themes and weird time shenanigans. They previously designed an interactive theater piece called Boss Battle, a game where one group of workers has the option to negotiate with a single player, a boss, over the rules of how the rest of the game is played. Jordon recalls that when it debuted at Come Out and Play in 2017, the group of workers went on strike.
Time Bandit, though, is Jordon’s first major video game. It’s finally headed to Steam on July 24 after nearly a decade in development. Jordon first started work on Time Bandit in 2014, inspired at the time by Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the Nintendo DS and the ways in which it turned gaming into an appointment of sorts. They tell me that at the time, they were playing New Leaf every day for 10 to 15 minutes, but were only checking in to talk to villagers, water flowers, and listen to the music. They hadn’t progressed by building their house or engaged with the other, more video-gamey aspects hardly at all.
“I feel like there’s some sort of radical potential contained in Animal Crossing, the way that it gives you all of the game stuff, traditional game loops and things like that,” Jordon says. “But it offers other points of interest so that you can totally ignore those, and instead just do whatever you want to do with the game. I think it’s tied to the real-time aspects of the game, the way that it’s like a space that you live in. So then I was thinking, what if I made a game that was more of a story-driven, goal-driven adventure game that drew on those real time events, and…would deal exclusively with time as a theme?”
