By then the tree I've planted will have finished growing, the bridge I'm building will have finished building, and some of the boxes I'm trying to move at work will have finished moving themselves one space forward or backward. It will be a great day. Until then, all we have to do is wait.
This is Time Bandit, intentional hard work where all of your tasks take real time. You play... well, who knows? Another unidentified cadet recently recruited directly from the Labor Reserve Army, runs through the chests in a cavernous storage in pursuit of "time crystals": literally petrified chunks of time that your capitalist masters take from you on top of all that alienating labor.
It hurts. Even the simplest tasks take at least an hour, and some take a whole day. Almost all of them take away from your quickly dissipating power reserves, and what you pay barely covers the cost of purchasing the tools you need to continue doing work in the future. It's part Cart Life, part Metal Gear Solid, part idle game, and playing it is literally a chore. I love him? I think I love him
A matter of time
Time Bandit is a political satire, dedicated to stirring up the darkly comic absurdities of our everyday existence under an increasingly declining form of international capitalism. To human capital and avatars - your superiors - you are just a resource: an accumulation of hours of work that must be drained and tossed aside when they are spent. The streets are cold and empty, the beach is under the paving stones, and one of the first tasks it gives you is to cut down the last tree in the nearby forest in order to build a bridge (you can plant a new tree, it takes 24 hours).
So it takes some time to play. Truth be told, I'm not far from that yet. I'll be further afield, but I think to unlock the side of the game where I start pilfering time crystals from work, I should do that meeting I was talking about earlier. I was originally supposed to get it at 10am today but was double booked. A real life meeting has replaced my virtual meeting in importance. My contact—a fishy, copyright-infringing scuba-diving-equipped spy named Longtail Duck—angrily called me on the radio when I got back to the game at about 11am.
We had to reschedule, which means I have to wait again for, uh, 22 hours to see what he wants from me.
Meanwhile, I have to attend to household chores, manage my waning energy, and remember to check when my tasks are complete to advance them to the next stage. It's kind of an idle cliché, but still strangely attractive.
Most of the weirdos on my radio are under this or that side of capital too, and checking in with them whenever I'm back in the game (time flies while they're closed) feels like I'm fostering a weird kind of frustrated solidarity. None of us are revolutionary—although someone around town is supposed to be plastering the walls with these anarchic hammer and sickle symbols—but we are all unsuccessful, doomed, and alienated. We all feel powerless, at least in the moment, but at least we are all powerless together.
But the game promises more than what I've seen so far. Once I can actually have my meeting with Longtail Duck, I hope there won't be another 24-hour wait before I unlock the hidden part of the game. So far, most of the gameplay I've tried has been block-pushing: paving a path (one hour at a time) to time crystals that I then return to my bosses for a pittance. I suspect Longtail will tell me that I might instead steal them, slip them between the cams and the guards and sell them for far more than I would have gotten out of my paycheck.
In other words: I can claim my work, time, and surplus value stolen from my superiors. All I have to do is risk punishment and deprivation for doing so. I will. Someone has to teach the bastards a lesson after all, and it's easier to do that in the game than it is in real life.
Once upon a time, a worker named Elastico Gomez wrote one of the best articles I've ever read: an angry, brilliant reflection on their time working in an Amazon warehouse. The article concluded, "I want all workers to spend more time with each other, plot against the company, break the net of surveillance, ideology, pillage and smash whatever they can get their hands on." Time Bandit feels like someone read this article and made a game out of it. I can't wait for the second part.