I'm opening this review with a controversial statement that might make you raise an eyebrow in conjunction with my high rating- Just hear me out when I say this:

Time Bandit is not a game.

This isn't an expression of gatekeeping, however, nor is it a dogwhistle. It's also not a superlative praise, or a delusion - Time Bandit is a video game in the sense it uses the format's inner workings, language, conventions and aesthetics - not to mention quoting and referencing a number of games. I don't draw this line to discredit-

I draw this line because Time Bandit breaks the boundary of games with its mechanics and narrative design.

When Time Bandit reached over and grabbed at my spare time; when it made me set real-world alarms and estimate the travel time of routes to and from the virtual workplace to my virtual apartment; when it gave me very little to no instruction and withheld instruction in the sour tone of an entitled boss' snark when I accidentally chose a less subordinate dialogue option during the tutorial; when, for wrongly doing a job you only just got into, it sues the audience's virtual avatar, which lands them in a realistically timed prison cell;

When Time Bandit did all of that, it broke out of the medium. Time Bandit, to me, is the video game equivalent of a brawl breaking out between the opposing teams in a baseball stadium; a magic circle - a forthcoming contract of collaboration to the end of entertainment - broken.

Time Bandit is well-written, and well-designed. It does what it sets out to do beautifully. I felt as though transferred back to my call center job in 2017, where I would deliriously calculate my wage vs. the money spent on food and transport; the time in my day vs. the time spent walking to and from work.

Time Bandit is like your real-life job, and just as thankless.

And while it's an achievement to portray this experience in a manner that both captures the inherent abuse of capitalism and harshly criticises it - an achievement I can't help but applaud! - I find it difficult to recommend or unambiguously laud a game that makes its point in a manner so similar to its object of criticism that it is, in a few respects, indistinguishable from it.

If we go for a low blow, I would even point out that unlike real world jobs, Time Bandit doesn't pay you for your trouble. Though this veers into further discussion that logically leads to "the whole of capitalism is a scam", and breaks the bounds of a review.

In the end, I can't help but to show great respect for this game - its vision, its execution, its message. The entire thing is viciously reactive to player action; I will be playing its continuations.

Time Bandit: Part 1 - Appendages of the Machine: Some neat concepts in a game purposefully designed to waste your time as much as possible (“All games are a waste of time,” fine, but not like this). Even if you agree with the heavy-handed political messages, you're sure to find them overbearing and obnoxious, especially when it's all padding around waiting, waiting, and more waiting.
You know how in Ocarina of Time, King Zora took forever to scoot out of the way so you could get behind him? Imagine if that was an entire video game. That's Time Bandit.

Literally the first thing the game does is waste your time. You watch a woman ride in an elevator which stops to pick up slow-moving, crystalline business people and stops again to let them off, one of them tarrying for no reason. When the woman gets to the top floor, the screen flips to a clock to show you time passing by, before she walks to her desk to boot up a slow-loading Windows 95. Then there's a brief and well-done tutorial of her flipping through a couple of games before you're launched into (I believe they're unnamed, so:) Company's orientation process.
You learn you're supposed to push boxes to get to crystals, the puzzle portion of this game. Each box takes half an hour of real time to move one space. If it's a trash pile which can't be pushed? Compacting it also takes half an hour before you can push it, which is still thirty minutes. “That's the point, it's wasting your time intentionally!” Okay, and? Why does that make it good? It's still successfully wasting your time if these actions only took ten minutes, just less excessively. Or is it better if it takes longer? Why not take an hour per action?
Your character only has something like thirty minutes (less, when active) of energy at a time. To fill it all the way back up, they need eight hours of real time rest. Hardy har har.

Again, the game is very political. I'm not a Communist because I live in the real world, yet there's no denying the power of collective bargaining and I'm fully aware that corporations LOVE to recklessly exploit anything and everything when given the opportunity. So despite me agreeing with portions of the rhetoric, I still found the conversations about it all to be dull and too lengthy. You're jumping into this game, a game clearly meant to be played for like fifteen minutes at a time, and in the middle of your trip to the facility you're locked in a long codec call with someone lecturing you about the pitfalls of automation for the working class. At least when your boss calls you to be an asshole, it's brief (and usually funny).
As someone who recently started working again, I definitely think it's good to ask yourself about your time spent at work and what you're getting for it. This game, in a nutshell, wants you to ask yourself that exact question. The problem is: once you're on that road, one of the next logical questions is “Why am I wasting my free time playing a game that intentionally makes things a hassle?” Certainly not for the flashy, impressive cutscenes; this game is clearly done in the spirit of the original Metal Gear Solid (it has its own Solid Snake) and looks just as old.

Despite the low fidelity, I found many areas caused a bizarre frame rate drop. I once loaded the game where I had left it (in my apartment), only to have my character go to court for the crime of trespassing... which, admittedly, I had just been doing, but I wasn't caught. I also had a codec call start while I was being run over by a minecart, which kept the camera stationary while my character moved around, forcing me to quit and restart the game while in the facility and go to jail for it. Jail is a twelve hour wait, by the way.

Lots of bads, I'd say. The goods? I actually like the MGS visuals, there's a charm in the simplicity (but why is the performance so lousy?). I liked the puzzles, especially the minecart section (but everything takes way too long for no payoff and the ending is a “To be continued” screen). I liked the occasional humor (when it wasn't at my expense). Hidden crystals in town was a good idea.

Eventually, I followed the dev's own personal guide (on the Steam discussions) of how to beat the clock. Frankly, you'd be stupid not to. There's even an achievement for booting up the game ten years later, I think they want you messing with your computer's time settings. I was able to sell all my crystals to the union and find the hidden ones around the city on my own, so I think I did well and do not feel bad about “cheating”.

I think it's wild that a game this deliberately annoying would have the gall to ask you to be excited (and wait some more!) for Part 2. I'm happy I supported a creative dude who, judging by his contributions in the Steam discussions, seems to be really considerate. However, this game is simply not a good game; it's a chore structured like a second job and there's no reward for your efforts. I highly doubt any of its structure can be changed much for Part 2 without making Part 1 look even more laborious, so I am not looking forward to it. I think I've served my time.
I wish Joel Jordan the best of luck on whatever comes after Time Bandit is through.

I do not recommend Time Bandit.

[ Day 1 - September 7th, 2023 ]
Time Bandit stands out as one of the more unique experiences I've had with a game. The central mechanic of the game is interactions taking real world time to complete. You work in a warehouse in a desolate, company-owned town, and are tasked with moving boxes around to collect time crystals. This is represented by sokoban-type puzzles. The equipment you need to use to complete your work will take at least 30 minutes to complete an action, sometimes longer, but you can leave it to work even with the game closed. This might sound like a gimmick, and it did seem that way to me at first, but the game does a great job of fully exploring this concept.

Early on, there was an event that started to make me think this game was something special. You meet a character who is part of a resistance against the company you work for, and he wants to schedule a meeting with you tomorrow. You have to pick a real world time, and show up in a specific location at that time. So fucking cool. As the game goes on there's a lot of really neat interactions with time. You can get put in jail and have to wait out the sentence before you can continue playing. You can get injured and have to go to the hospital and wait out your stay there. Your job shift changes to random times each day. It really feels like the idea was fully explored.

[ Day 2 - September 8th, 2023 ]
As far as the moment-to-moment gameplay, I mentioned the sokoban puzzles previously. These aren't anything especially complex, but they do require a good bit of thought as you have to plan out your moves in advance. These also introduce other elements with different types of equipment and obstacles. I never found the puzzles too difficult, but they were interesting enough to be satisfying. There are other elements to the game as well, and it's quite an interesting mix of genres. There's a management element, you earn money through your work but you're required to provide your own equipment beyond what you get at the start. You can buy more stuff at the town's general store, but you also have to balance this with saving money for trips to the hospital and buying gas to power the equipment you already have. Early on you also learn of a secret entrance to the warehouse and can sneak in while you're not on the clock, introducing a stealth element. You can get some extra work done, or more importantly steal from the company, but if you get caught you'll be sent to jail for trespassing.

That leads into my main complaint I have with the game, which is the late game tedium of the stealth sections. Unless you keep track of your ever-changing schedule and only play the game during those times, then more often than not you'll be playing when you're off-shift. This requires you to sneak into work, which is exciting enough at first, but by the end of the game I got very tired of. You can follow basically the same path every time, and there's only a handful of layouts of the cameras and patrolling robots that can catch you, which you'll quickly learn to recognize. This is compounded by the fact that the later game content is further into the area, which requires you to walk and crawl through an even longer path over and over. The dull repetition of work ties into the story and themes of the game, so I can almost forgive this as intentional, but I still feel there could have been some more variety to what you actually have to do with the stealth and still accomplish this goal.

[ Day 3 - September 9th, 2023 ]
I haven't really talked much about the story up to this point, and while you've probably realized that the company in the game sounds pretty evil, you might expect it to not address that on a deeper level. Time Bandit gets into some very political themes, and while it's a bit heavy-handed in some of the ways it talks about them, it addresses stuff I haven't seen any other games really talk about sincerely and tries to educate the player on real political ideas. The story is told through interacting with just a handful of characters. There's your boss at work, a coworker, a member of the resistance movement, and the local store owner. While you do sometimes talk to them in person, most conversations are done over radio. Sometimes they'll reach out to you with something to talk about, but you can also contact any of them at any point in the game and they'll have different things to say depending on the context of what you're doing. I won't spoil more of the details than I already have, but it does stand out as very different among the medium of games and uses it pretty effectively.

One thing I wanted to address that didn't fit neatly elsewhere in the review is the time commitment of this game. It might sound like a lot, but I really don't think this is too much for anyone to handle. It took me a bit over a month to complete the game, but in that time Steam says I only spent a bit under 8 hours in game. Most of my sessions were just logging in for the day, playing 5-10 minutes, and closing it. You could definitely complete it faster in real time by managing the timers more efficiently, but I enjoyed just starting it up whenever I felt like it, rarely more than once or twice a day, with occasional skipped days. Through the various limitations, this also seems to be the way the game wants you to approach it. A very cool side effect of this is that at least for the first while, I felt like I was spending more time with the game while I wasn't playing it than while I was. It gives you a lot to think about between play sessions and planning ahead for what you're going to do next time is a really cool experience. I was admittedly not feeling this way so much towards the end and was pretty ready for it to be over, but it's such a unique overall package and I had such a good time with it for the most part that I'd still easily recommend this to anyone.