now playing: "Fly Guy"

Genre(s): Weird/unknown
Credits: TVM Studio, 2006

On the spectrum of interactive media, Fly Guy falls away from the "gaming" side and on the... I-don't-know-what-it-is side. It's a Flash animation that more closely resembles an art exhibit than a genuine casual video game. Granted, it's one that you can walk through, explore, and touch-and-feel to a certain extent—and compared to other "interactive art" pieces that I've seen pop up before, this one lets you craft your own experience by going at your own pace through the "exhibit."

Alright, let's drop the formalities and just celebrate Fly Guy for what it is. It's an adventure akin to waking up late on a Saturday morning knowing that the sun is shining, there are cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and that you can spend all day watching Doctor Who on your Netflix queue and playing Mario Kart Wii wi-fi tournaments. I don't know about you, but that right there is my dream day.

 

You're a generic, anonymous businessman standing at a bus stop in a blank, colorless world. (There is no bus either.) The side-scrolling world wraps around, so walking on the ground will only bring you back to the bus stop, eventually. However, should you choose to fly (hint hint: it's called Fly Guy for a reason), you'll soar into the heights of a whimsical world in the sky—in outer space—and eventually, strangely enough, into the abyssal oceanic depths, which washes you up on the shore of a surprising, random, and amusing ending. If you're taking your time to wander about and explore, you'll finish the "game" in an entire five minutes, and like I said, that's just if you're going slow. Along the way, you'll interact with a variety of quirky characters and creatures; most will simply enliven your upward journey with humorous diversions, while a few will send you literally back down to earth (any surprise that the cell phone and copier are included on that list?).

You have complete control  over your flight and movement—ascending and descending at will, coasting occasionally when you please, activating hotspot areas with quirky characters time and again.

Although it could be assumed that your fly guy's ascent into the sky is his final act of living on a horridly monotonous (and dare I say that word absurd?) plane of existance, ultimately the whole identity of this game is about escaping from everything and just letting loose—something that games have pretty much always been historically meant to accomplish, but sometimes that escapist factor gets lost amid hosts of stats and scores and mechanics to keep track of. In Fly Guy, you can fall back to the ground, but you can't die, strictly-speaking; while your natural impulse is to keep going up, up, and away as high as you can, you're also encouraged to goof around with your environment and your comically-amusing movements. The carefree looping tones in the background, interspersed periodically with humorous rock and techno motifs where appropriate, keep the adventure lively and, most importantly, stress-free.

Stress-free. I cannot stress this point enough. Stress-free, it seems, is what the entire message is about, fitting it perfectly into the casual genre.

That's right. Rocking out hardcore with aliens for the win. Katy Perry would be so jealous.

While Fly Guy is technically not a game, it's got all the values that make it a beautiful interactive piece: a narrative uniquely defined by the player's choice of experiences and a relatable PC.

Next Friday: As we wrap up the 2011 calender year next month, let's take a look at how we can use games to teach game-making. That's right—expect a special December-long focus on the most meta discussion we've had yet on "transcending pixels"!