Time Bandit Is Anti-Capitalist, Dark Animal Crossing Bathed in Retro Metal Gear Aesthetic

ign.com:

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