Project Introduction

Time Bandit is a unique real-time adventure game where everything you do takes time. Place down a robot to push a box for you, for example, and it will take an actual half an hour to finish. By saving the game and coming back periodically, you are invited to make as much or as little progress as you like, to make playing it a kind of habit or meaningful ritual, to welcome addictive gameplay loops or instead explore how to break them while watching the real-time sunsets.

Time Bandit is not just an experiment in real-time mechanics but also in the pacing of storytelling. The company you work for is trying to take control of time to make you work for them forever, and an anti-capitalist dark comedy about stealing back from them unfolds slowly over actual days and weeks of playtime, to inspire continuous reflection – both while you are playing and while you are not -- on how social and historical conditions shape our subjective experience of time and our mental health in general. I am interested in making political games that reflect my experiences, and in that vein the game deals with, in a serious but also darkly comic way, themes of economic oppression, the commodification of our relationships, and hope for radical change. My goal is for the game to ultimately tell a story of how our time does not belong to us and how we can take it back.

About Developer

I am a queer, nonbinary working-class developer working on Time Bandit on my own without any publisher or funding. I have been working on it for a long time, in a process that has turned out to resemble the real-time experience of playing the game. I have previously worked on a variety of hybrid digital/physical games, with a particular focus on experimental and political work.