Time Bandit Is Anti-Capitalist, Dark Animal Crossing Bathed in Retro Metal Gear Aesthetic
Three times so far I’ve deleted the Time Bandit save file and started a new game. I fail so many times that I miss a very important appointment with a strange person wearing scuba gear who wants to meet me in secret. The fourth charm is to get up early and make an appointment. I can finally go back to work.
Developer Joel Jordon approached me to cover Time Bandit in this column a few months ago, based on my love for it. A similar real-time game, The Longing. Time Bandit exists within the same very small genre of games that take place in real time, but with a story that unfolds minute by minute instead of endless like Animal Crossing and certain mobile games. You play as a factory worker tasked with mining a mysterious object called the Crystal of Time. Most of the time crystals are hidden throughout the facility behind minecarts, debris, and other obstacles. Your job is to use your trusty forklift and other tools to remove obstacles one by one and collect them for your company. Simple, right?
But it’s not. First, using a forklift (and all other tools) takes energy and time. Energy can only be replenished by returning to the apartment and sleeping for hours. This is useful because with the tool it would take him minutes or even hours to finish moving one obstacle at a time. The tool is also powered by fuel, but the cost is real time and he has to pay out of pocket using the wages he earns once a day. All of this means that Time Bandit is primarily a game where you open the game, get paid, buy fuel, set up your forklift and other tools to start their respective tasks, then go back to sleep and finish the game while you wait.
Describing Time Bandit is like describing a farm sim full of chores, in that it sounds very boring but is actually compelling. I think part of it stems from his PS1-era aesthetic with haunting Metal Gear influences that mesmerizes me with striking shots like the clock tower in the heart of the city. But most of my fascination stemmed from the narrative context of the game. Early on, the aforementioned scuba buddy approached me outside the factory and offered a secret meeting the next day at a time of my choosing. I was urged many times not to miss it. I didn’t know what would happen if I did. I was too worried about pissing him off so he missed the game and restarted the game all 3 times. When I finally attended the meeting, I was told about the factory’s true motives and the true power of the time crystals I was mining for it. Armed with new knowledge, I had a choice of what to do with these crystals, given missions centered around the value of time and labor, yes, the ability to commit literal time theft from his 1% of the game.
Chatting with Jordan over coffee at GDC, it quickly became apparent how they ended up making a game that was pretty heavy, about anti-capitalist themes and weird time pranks.they designed earlier An interactive theatrical piece called Boss Battle, a game in which one group of workers has the option of negotiating with one player, their boss, over the rules of how the rest of the game should be played. Jordon recalls groups of workers going on strike when the product debuted at Come Out and Play in 2017.
However, Time Bandit is Jordon’s first major video game. After about 10 years of development, it will finally appear on Steam on July 24th. Jordan began production on his first Time Bandit in 2014. At the time, I was inspired by Animal Crossing for the Nintendo DS and the way it turned the game into a kind of promise. At the time, they would play New Leaf for 10-15 minutes each day, only checking in to talk to villagers, water flowers, and listen to music. They hadn’t made much progress building a house or working on very little other video game aspect.
“I feel like Animal Crossing has some kind of fundamental potential in terms of delivering all the game elements and traditional game loops and things like that,” Jordan says. “But it offers other interesting points, so you can ignore them completely and do whatever you want with the game instead. I think that ties in with the real-time aspect of the game, which is kind of like the space you live in. So I thought, what if we make a more story-driven, goal-driven adventure game that takes advantage of these real-time events, and… what if we make a game that only deals with time as a theme?”
At the same time, free-to-play mobile games were also gaining popularity in 2014, and people were just as excited about the idea of letting people play in real time over time. Jordan was similarly inspired by this. They propose that free-to-play games segment their in-game economy into “haves” and “have nots” based on who is willing to pay up front and who is willing to do so. Time Bandit, on the other hand, is a game where you have no choice but to play as a have-not who must work to survive.
The story of Time Bandit moves pretty quickly (or slow, depending on your sense of time), but it quickly becomes apparent that it’s some kind of anti-capitalist dark comedy. And if you make a mistake, it can have pretty serious consequences. If you don’t go back to your apartment and rest, and directly leave the game or run out of energy while working, you will be sent to prison, from which it will take time and money to get out. If you move the box the wrong way (as I did very early on), you will have to spend time, money (fuel) and energy putting it back in the right place before you can move forward. Finally, they are also given a work schedule that allows them to enter the factory only at certain times of the day, as long as they don’t risk any consequences. Everything is slow and methodical, and it gets more so over time, and you have to be sure of your promises every time you play.
They say this was done intentionally by Jordan’s side. What about that early meeting you finally managed to attend after missing three times? Jordon says it’s actually a little test for players to decide whether they’re serious about playing a game like Time Bandit.
“I want to ask players, ‘Are you ready for this experience?’ If not, you can quit now. If you really want to, this game isn’t as demanding as it seems. And I don’t want it to be. I want players to be really open to how they want to experience it.”
They add that players who have already tried and enjoyed Time Bandit often give feedback that check-ins are no different than real-time mobile games in that they are quite addictive. Jordon wants to be careful with this categorization – Time Bandit doesn’t include microtransactions, after all – but they suggest that games are always designed to explore this topic as well.
“This is a game about addictive loops,” they say. “And I want to get that to a certain point, and then critique them and get people thinking and thinking about how they actually want to spend their time… sometimes at certain points in the game. [you’ll be] You’ll probably have to wait days or weeks for something to happen. I think this is a potentially interesting way of letting people who have become accustomed to experiencing time one way experience it another way, using that loop. ”
I’m still slowly making my way towards the “end” of Time Bandit, but Jordon said it’s not really the end. Time Bandit is meant to be episodic, with a multi-part story, varying levels of time pressure “strength”, and different real-time mechanics in each section. He’s only the first of four parts coming out on July 24th, but with Time Bandit’s basic systems in place, Jordan reassures him, it’s likely he’ll be in development for the next part in less than nine years.
At least in that regard, it’s thematically appropriate to have to make it real. real As time goes by, you’ll see the story of Time Bandit come to an end. i can’t wait. I mean, you can, and you have to.
“The context this story provides is to make players think about how time is shaped by the social and historical forces and systems in which we live,” says Jordan. “It’s about making people think about changing their subjective experience of time, not just practicing things like meditation and mindfulness. What does it actually take to develop a different experience of time?”
Rebekah Valentine is IGN’s Senior Reporter. you can find her on her twitter @duck valentine.
