Watcha Playin’?-Killing Time at Lightspeed
Killing Time at Lightspeed is an interactive fiction game from Gritfish. It’s set in a distant future where humanity has colonies on all kinds of planets, and travel to them has been commercialized. That’s how you, a character named Jay, end up on a cryogenically stable space ship on its way to a planet called Gliese 667C, where you’ll be making a new life. The trip takes about 29 Earth years, but thanks to modern technology, it will only feel like half an hour to you!
You spend this half an hour on FriendPage, catching up on your friends’ lives as they go on without you. Despite being on a social media app for the entire time, Killing Time at Lightspeed slowly becomes a profoundly lonely experience as you begin to realize that each time you refresh your feed, literal years have passed for your friends back home. You often end up commenting on posts that are years old, and are constantly trying to play catch up on what’s happening in their lives.
The time lapse on your feed also provides context about the political and social unrest that begin to unfold due to the emergence and subsequent popularity of the first ever commercial tech implants for humans. Like many other games in the genre, society in Killing Time at Lightspeed is struggling with who should count as human, and how far is too far when it comes to technical modification of human bodies. The answers aren’t easy, and it’s hard to watch your friends deal with the fallout, knowing there’s nothing you can do to help or intervene.
I really enjoyed my time with Killing Time at Lightspeed. It’s a pretty short game, sticking to that half an hour guarantee, if you’re not deep diving into every readable article and social media thread. It was nice to be able to sit in my bed and click through the story at my leisure. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of 2064: Read Only Memories with the focus on cybernetic implants, definitions of humanity, and pixel-art avatars. I also really appreciated that the game blatantly acknowledges that when government crackdowns and surveillance are put in place, they’re usually focused on marginalized folks.
The only thing I didn’t really care for was the fact that responses and posts would occasionally be repeated, but it’s definitely forgivable since everything else is pretty high quality. It’s also really nice that it’s available on a couple different platforms. I bought it on my iPhone, but you can play it in a browser, or get the enhanced edition on Steam.
Image courtesy of Gritfish.
