A clever game about flies and brief lives encounters the limits of statistics
Switzerland is “easy mode” in Time Flies, as is Japan. But, in the game, Palestine presents a problem.
Just under a month ago, the PR firm for an unusual late-July video game sent reviewers an unusual note.
The agency was emailing out redemption codes for review access to Time Flies, a new black-and-white PC/PS5/Switch video game about accomplishing as many tasks as possible during the brief lifespan of a fly.
In the game’s opening level, the player steers the fly through a two-story home, as a timer ticks down. They can land the fly on a TV remote to press its buttons, turn on a record player and let the fly go for a spin, fly it into a lamp, land it onto a drop of alcohol, tickle a sleeping person’s feet, and more—time permitting.
Inevitably, the fly dies, and then the player tries again with a new one.
In Time Flies, players pick where in the world their fly is from. Their fly’s lifespan will match, in seconds, what the life expectancy is, in years, in the country they’ve selected. So, U.S. flies in Time Flies live for 76.4 seconds. Japanese flies live for 84.5.
The game is unusual, but the PR firm’s email about a review copy wasn’t out of the norm. Nor was the attached notice that the game would receive a downloadable patch, numbered 1.0.2, prior to release. In the world of modern game reviews, such things are regular.
Less common, however, was one of the patch notes: “Two selectable regions added: Palestine and Puerto Rico.”
The co-developers of Time Flies, Switzerland-based Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz, decided several years ago to work life expectancy data from the World Health Organization into a project that would become this game.
Frei recalls keeping up with the WHO during COVID lockdowns.
“I was looking at World Health Organization data quite often to understand the crisis,” he told me last week. He’d stare at the death tolls. “How many people? Where? And why?”
He’d also become briefly transfixed by his discovery one day of a single dead pixel on a new 4K TV he’d purchased during the pandemic lockdowns. He reasoned that the TV had nearly eight million pixels. “There was the one that didn't work, and I was really annoyed by this one pixel,” he said. “And at the same day I think, like, 40 people died in Switzerland.” There were roughly eight million people in Switzerland, he recalled, and he was struck by his ability to feel frustration about that dead pixel while feeling numb to the news of 40 more deaths.
“I think that's how it started, kind of thinking about making a game with an annoying pixel and, kind of like, having a juxtaposition with this WHO data,” he said.
Frei and Munoz decided they’d make a browser app, then a game, something with a fly, something about, as Frei would put it to me during our interview last week, “the finiteness of our existence and what to do with it, with the time we have.”
The game includes cryptic, jokey to-do lists. The puzzle of playing is figuring out what to do to cross each item off, and how to get to all of them before the timer runs out.
Once Frei and Munoz worked the WHO data into the game, they imagined people would explore the differences between life expectancy from country to country.
“I think most people don't really know what these numbers are,” Munoz said. “When you don't have a very high number, you can go, ‘Oh, is there a higher number than in my country?’”
“If you look at that list, I think it makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable,” Frei said.
When I noted that Switzerland has a particularly good number in Time Flies, clocking in at 83.3 seconds, Frei responded, saying, “I don't know if it's a good number.”
He continued: “It's a number that makes you feel guilty a little bit, no?
“Switzerland, it's kind of the easy mode in the game.”
As Frei and Munoz closed in on the game’s release, they noticed that their source data had regions of the world that they hadn’t worked into the game.
“When we saw Palestine in the list, we thought that would make sense to add it,” Munoz said.
“For Puerto Rico, I didn't know much about it. It was there, so it made sense to have it.”
The data for those regions was indeed easy to miss. The WHO’s own official website for life expectancy at birth doesn’t list either of them in its drop-down menu of countries, but the downloadable file of regional data, from which the page draws, includes both.
Neither Puerto Rico nor Palestine is globally recognized as a country, of course. The former is a territory of the United States and the subject of the occasional referendum for independence or statehood. The latter is occupied by Israel amid decades of violence and occasional calls by foreign nations, as recently as last week, for statehood.
For Time Flies, the inclusion of Puerto Rico and Palestine, plays into the comparisons the game invites. They help gives the game, which at a glance seems lighthearted, some of its bite.
Decide your fly is from Puerto Rico and you’ll see a life expectancy of 79.9 seconds. A fly from the United States will live 76.4 seconds.
A fly from Palestine will live 73.5 seconds.
A fly from Israel will live 81.7 seconds, a fly from Lebanon 74.3, and a fly from Saudi Arabia 76.4.
The catch—and it’s a big one—is that the data in Time Flies is relatively old.
The WHO’s life expectancy information was last updated on August 2, 2024, and is based on information gathered about the year 2021.
That means that Time Flies’ life expectancy stats are more recent than the worst years of COVID, but they are pre- many other deadly events on the planet. They’re prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is likely to have cut life expectancy in both countries. They predate the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, per media reports, and took 250 people hostage. And it also precedes Israel’s subsequent bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which has killed 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The Palestinian number in Time Flies is likely one of the least accurate life expectancy stats in the game.
Unicef, pulling data from the United Nations, recently calculated the average life expectancy in “The State of Palestine,” as of 2023, was 65.2 years. (It had been 76.7 the year before.)
A January 2025 study in The Lancet found that life expectancy of Palestinians specifically in the Gaza Strip had dropped by 34.9 years, to about 40, just over half the pre-war level.
The Time Flies developers acknowledge that world events have outpaced their data and say they’ll update the game when the WHO updates its statistics.
The WHO did not reply to a request for comment about when they’d next update their life expectancy data, nor how current it will be.
Time Flies is meant to be heavy and light at the same time.
The to-do lists and life expectancy timers are “grim,” Frei said, but many of the interactions in the game—as you get the fly drunk or knock a fig leaf off of a statue’s crotch—are silly.
“It's these two things together; it is kind of what makes the game interesting to me,” Frei said.
There’s a little touch in Time Flies that Munoz hopes people will notice. In the first level, players can fly their fly into a lamp, where they can collect coins that extend the fly’s life.
“I hope that some people will realize things that maybe they didn't think about before,” Munoz said.
“I think the life expectancy stuff is the most obvious, but we left a few things in the game.”
Item 2: In brief…
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Switch 2 hardware is unchanged, but the system’s Joy-Con 2 controllers will now sell for $100 instead of $95, for anyone who wants an extra pair.
Nintendo is banking that consumers will find ways to absorb the increased prices. Ahead of the price hikes last week, the company told investors that “[w]hile there have been changes in the market environment since we announced our initial forecast for the fiscal year, such as the U.S. tariff measures, at this time there is no significant impact on our earnings forecast for this fiscal year.”
🎮 ProbablyMonsters, the 2016 gaming start up that raised hundreds of millions in funding, sold its Firewalk (Concord) studio to Sony, but has cancelled multiple projects and laid off dozens of workers, is now on a “sustainable” path, founder Harold Ryan tells Game Developer.
The company announced two games today: Storm Lancers, a 2D co-op roguelike game for Switch, and Ire: A Prologue, a first-person horror game for PC, both $20, both set for release later this year.
💡 Unionized quality assurance workers at Microsoft-owned Raven Studios (Call of Duty) have secured a contract after three years of labor negotiations, Wisconsin Watch reports.
The outlet notes that “the contract gives employees a 10% raise while limiting mandatory overtime and preserving remote work options.”
🤔 Mastercard says it “has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms,” in an apparent denial that it is to blame for a recent crackdown of sex games on PC gaming marketplaces Steam and Itch.io.
But Steam operator Valve tells Kotaku that Mastercard told payment processors…who then told Valve…that Steam’s existing content guidelines were insufficient “and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.” That rule, per Kotaku, bars transactions that are illegal or “may damage the goodwill of the Corporation.”
The crackdown followed a pressure campaign on credit card companies by anti-pornography group Collective Shout over sex games on the marketplaces. Opponents of the crackdown have called it censorship and have been reportedly flooding credit card call centers with complaints.
🛳️ Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has purchased Oceanco, the company making his $400 million yacht, PC Gamer reports.
Fascinated by the concept Time Flies used for their game and loved your reporting on it. Thank you, Stephen!