Fly Guy

Before I begin the first Casually Games article ever, let me say that beginnings are always a thing. Where to start from? There's obvious topics, from blatant talents such as Petri Purho or Daniel Benmergui, to brainstorm posts of the kind "Can you think of a game controlled only by X?", to writing about how some games still intrigue me when I try to pinpoint what exactly makes them tick so nicely on the screen.

There will be time for all that. The best way to start this first piece is the beginning. "First things first" I always seem to say (at least that's what I've been told). So here's a little something about the first game I remember playing that made me think "Hey, is this really a game? Shouldn't games be more like this?" A game where you can't lose. Without goals. Yes, I know there's conceptual games previous to this one --this is just MY first.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Fly Guy.



"Who could forget Fly Guy?" That's how the wise guys at TVM Studio have blurbed their game. Not conceit at all: it's 100% true. There's something unforgettable about Fly Guy.

So what is Fly Guy? It is a game developed around 2006 by Trevor Van Meter (Art), Jason Krogh (Code) and Van Kottas (Main theme) about an office guy who flies. And you can't lose. I said that already. But that's about it. Yet, it's all you need.

Yep, not even a goal. (But I've said that too, already).

The playing character looks very much like your average dog-tired low-grade office stressed-out worker after a hard day. ("It has the look of an elaborate, interactive New Yorker Cartoon" writes Ron White, PC World editor, in his review). As you take off flying away from your daily bus stop and your daily worries and exploring the weird and fascinating things that inhabit the streets, skies, outer space, deep seas, the game succeeds in making the player enter that frame of mind as well. That is, skipping home, carried by the purity of wanderlust. And I say purity because it's just that: no goal or ticking bomb to carry your mind in another direction. Plain old wanderlust.

That's an untold goal, I'd say. "Let's make a game that makes you enter a different frame of mind": a creative goal for the developing team, something not said in words to the player, somethign that rather happens to the player.

There's a lot left untold in this game and that's the level at which this game works best.

There's an untold story, for instance (that of the after-office-tired everyman, suggested by details: the open collar and lack of tie and the implied idea that no one is waiting for him back home), that translates into what no other game had done for me until Fly Guy: the story of Fly Guy runs untold, as subtext, at a feeling level, wordlessly yet palpably. Fly Guy flies away into another frame of mind with all the time in the world to explore and marvel and enjoy --and to defy the very notion that games need a goal to be considered games, since there's not even a starting premise. And when you play (especially after the first time) that's where the game takes you too.

The music has a lot to do with it, but it's not all. Same with the graphics: very suggesting, yet supporting something else that's not exactly there. There's something running at a conceptual level that I'm trying to pinpoint. There's no tension in Fly Guy, and I mean that as praise. There IS something that Fly Guy compels the player to do. Wander. That's aimlessness as a positive trait, as goal even. How do you build fun into aimlessness?

Fly Guy is a different kind of game. I've played others (somewhat) like it over the years (I think of Cloud, Flow, Coil, Samorast, only to mention a few of the best known ones), and over and over they make me realize how far these games are subtly or not breaking the ground rules of conventional games in all simplicity... and unraveling new gameplay experiences while they do so.

Imagine yourself at TVM Studios. "Hey guys, I've got this thing going in my head... Think Mario gone vertical, yeah like a scroller, only different. You... you fly, y'know, yeah, that's it, you fly and relax and you go to strange places and have fun."

"Hey, wait, I know. A flying saucer suddenly pops up and..."

"Yeah, and it's a Heavy Metal Fest with you and the alien".

"Well, that's not what I had in mind. But it might work."

Thanks, TVM Studios, for creating Fly Guy.