Killing Time at Lightspeed is a text-based, narrative game by Gritfish about browsing social media while voyaging between the stars.
You are a traveler who has left their life and your planet behind. Your lightspeed voyage will feel like less than an hour to you, but to your friends on Earth it will be twenty years. The only connection you have to those people is a news and social media feed: FriendPage.
This is a small indie game, clearly developed with limited resources. There are a few static illustrations in the introduction. After that, the entire game is contained within a simple, monochromatic yellow and black text console.
The game plays out in a series of turns, each one taking only a minute or two. During a turn, you can read your friends’ updates on FriendPage, and a handful of news headlines. You’re given the option to reply to one or two posts, and you can give them thumbs up or thumbs down. When you’ve read and responded as much as you like, you can click a button to “refresh” the page. When you do, a year passes back on earth and the news and social feeds update.
With that click of a button, you may see the results of an action a friend was considering. Relationship statuses are updated as the people you know get together and break up. They get married and have children. New technology appears, like cybernetic implants and humanoid androids. Your friends have time to adjust to societal and personal changes, but for you it all comes and goes in minutes instead of years.
There are many sci-fi ideas at play here. The arguments about cybernetic enhancement cover similar ground to the Deus Ex games. Discussions of android rights echo Detroit: Become Human. However, with this short runtime and limited budget, the game can’t delve as deeply into these particular issues. In a way, that’s the point.
In Killing Time at Lightspeed, everything that happens in your social media feed is ephemeral—even more than in our day-to-day lives. It excels in delivering a feeling of being cut off and left behind. You’re reading about what everyone else is doing and experiencing, but you are alone.
How much can you really communicate with your friends when months or years pass between messages? Momentous changes in your friends’ lives are summarized in one or two sentences. How many other important things are you missing altogether? You can ask them about what’s happening, but how can they explain all the things that have happened to them since last year and your last message?
The point is really driven home in the final years of the game, when a new social media site becomes popular and friends start to drift away from FriendPage. You don’t have the option of making a new account or checking the new feed. You only have what your spaceship gives you. Soon, your feed is almost entirely filled with spam, bots, and pointless Buzzfeed-esque listicles. You’re stuck on MySpace, in space. Your one tenuous tether to Earth is nearly severed. But you keep refreshing in the hopes that someone will come back and post something.
Then you arrive at your destination. The terminal shuts down. The game is over. Your friends are far away, living their lives without you. Presumably you’ll go off and live a new life without them.
Killing Time at Lightspeed is shorter than a movie, and can be comfortably completed in a sitting. It’s a narrative snack, not a full meal. I didn’t walk away from it with a lot of new thoughts, as I sometimes do with games like this. Instead, it left me with a feeling. A melancholy vignette.
Killing Time at Lightspeed is available for PC on Steam and Humble Bundle.
Words Deferred 