Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) review

Peter Gibbons

We review Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself), a hilariously violent iPhone port of the online Flash game from Adult Swim

Published on Oct 23, 2009

Considering Apple is usually so prudish about adult content on iPhone, it’s a wonder that Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself), a port of the popular, hilariously violent Adult Swim online Flash game, made it through the approvals process.

Bearing that in mind, it's not unheard of for Apple to whip the rug out from under a recently approved game, so if you're a fan of the online title it's probably prudent not to waste too much time and swing by the App Store to buy Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) for your fill of suicidal fun.

The fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned nightmare of a cubicle-filled office prison is the setting for this outrageous social pastiche. Your life as a white-collar drone has become too monotonous to bear and, in an effort to avoid yet another meeting, it seems there's only one way out - suicide.

The trouble is, the next meeting is in five minutes, and with this being a modern, risk assessed work environment, it takes some wicked imagination to figure out how to push yourself off this torturous mortal coil.

Fortunately there’s no way to make the office environment 100 percent safe for a determined bureaucrat on the edge. As you dash about the Brent-esque workplace, most anything can be used as a tool of self-destruction. Slapping yourself with an open stapler, pushing your head into a paper shredder, setting a fire extinguisher alight and pointing it at your face, putting metal in the microwave and blocking the explosion with your body and smashing your head in the photo copier are all examples of the dangers you can deliberately put yourself in.

As you look for more inventive ways to end it all, you’ll even find yourself flooding the toilets and standing in a pool of water as you turn on the hand dryer to be electrocuted, drinking from a mop bucket full of bleach and eating the toxic urinal cakes. It's also worth considering engaging your fellow paper pushers in conversation, as winding them up in just the right way can encourage them to give you a good, life-threatening battering.

This iPhone port of Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) expands on the Flash version by adding in a multiplayer option. This two player game uses either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (depending on your preference) to pit you against another suicidal office slave - the winner being the one to finish themselves off the quickest.

One of the reasons Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) probably made it through the stringent approvals process at Apple is the clean cut, cartoon look to the graphics.

However, thanks to this Fisher-Price approach to visual vogue, the hilariously violent antics simply look all the more stylish, and with just as much viciousness as if they were photorealistic. Viewed from an isometric perspective, it's also very easy to navigate your way around using the touchscreen, while the hazardous objects are activated simply by tapping them.

The gross out, adult theme is likely to turn off the more sensible, prudish players (or, more probably, parents), but anyone who enjoys Adult Swim’s brutal sense of humour in shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force or Frisky Dingo will struggle not to cough up a lung from laughing at this wonderfully disgraceful game.