Time Bandit Preview - Good Things Comes To Ye Who Waits

Time Bandit is the epitome of indie development and the wonders one can achieve with their free time. I’ve never been a game developer, nor aspire to be one, but I’d imagine that ‘free time’ becomes one’s life.

Time plays a vital role in Joel Jordan’s adventure as all your actions occur in real-time. For example, the accompanying material for the game said that if you place down a robot to push a box for you, it’ll take an actual 30 minutes to complete.

So, Time Bandit is a sandbox? Not exactly. Here’s some exposition. Today (when you play the demo during Steam Next Fest), you start your new job at Mining & Chronometrics Multinational. It doesn’t get off to a great start as you’ll be operating the forklift trucks, and as an ‘independent contractor’ (read, loophole for the employer), you have to pay for the fuel out of your paycheck. Huh.

But wait: it gets better! You have to do all the manual work, regardless of what the boss says, which will cost energy. As the boss states at the beginning, if you lose all your energy you’ll become unconscious, and if you’re found in that state, they’ll throw you in jail. There’s something…unfair about this situation, don’t you think? There’s also no autosave – you have to return to your apartment to save the game; otherwise, you’ll lose all progress. Oh, it takes a full eight hours to replenish your energy.

How does Time Bandit play, then? Well, you navigate the city map looking to complete jobs. As this write-up is about the demo, many areas are locked, but besides that, you’ll get a good amount of gameplay out of it as conducting tasks takes, you guessed it – time. For example, I had to build a bridge and, once completing the actions, had to wait an hour for it to complete. In the meantime, there wasn’t much to do other than prank call the NPCs I’d already met.

The demo was played with a mixture of a controller and a keyboard – the latter mostly used to press enter, but most actions are on the controller, such as placing a call, crawling along the floor, and accessing your inventory of tools (you need to have these active to use them). Said actions are completed with a QTE, and you have to move the left stick and bash away at the A button for maximum efficiency. Of course, run your energy levels down, and unless you take an energy pill to replenish it, you’re heading to jail and will lose all progress.

Time Bandit is a little bit like Paratopic in the presentation. It’s very raw with a low resolution and janky animation. The characters walked awkwardly and exaggerated, and the perspectives of 3D objects within the world are skewed. But… like the aforementioned Paratopic, it’s quite charming in areas, and once you get used to it, it’s refreshing – especially when the QTE commands flash up on the screen.

However, as indicated in the dialogue and the game’s general premise, there’s a lot of waiting around. You could run multiple tasks at once to save some time, but you’re still going to have to wait. Perhaps make a few cups of tea, pluck your nose hair, or binge another series on Netflix, unless you’ve bailed like so many other subscribers have.

I foresee that this will gain much love in the indie community. Those looking for a bit more action or crisp triple-A graphics might not get this, but I liked tinkering with it and am interested to see where it goes when launched on PC and Mac later this year. Especially if there are more Longtail Duck moments.

In the meantime, Time Bandit will be available during the Steam Next Fest from the 13th of June. However, if you have the initiative, you can look it up now and play before that date. I suggest you do.