A MAZE. / Berlin 2021

10th International Games and Playful Media Festival

Time Bandit

What is Time Bandit?

by Joel Jordon (Canada)

Genre: Real-time

Time Bandit is a dark life sim where everything you do takes time. Place down a robot to push a box for you, for example, and it will take an actual half an hour to finish. By saving the game and coming back periodically to make progress, you are invited to explore your habits, rituals, and experience of time in general, particularly as it relates to work and exploitation. Time Bandit is an explicitly anticapitalist game with a slowly unfolding melodrama of political intrigue, dealing with themes of technological automation, economic crisis, environmental catastrophe, and radical change.

Platform: PC, Mac