Today we're going to be taking a look at Fly'N.
Fly'N is an indie PC 2D puzzle platformer that is available on Steam, made by Ankama Play. It has a very cutesy (pardon me for saying that word) art style which draws you in and makes you feel secure. Little do you know is that this is the kind of game that lures you into the alley way to give you something, right before mugging you and leaving you helpless on the cold floor. Seriously, the game is hard.
The game begins with an evil blow dryer named Dyer who is strangely amused by throwing garbage around huge trees in space, and it is up to the four Buds (the playable characters) to stop him. Each tree has a special Bud that is supposed to protect it's assigned tree. There's the blue Bud named Flyn (I told you, he takes all the credit), the green Bud named Lyft, the orange Bud named Nyls, and the black Bud named Ywok. Each Bud has the ability to do their fancy double jumps and gliding maneuvers, but they all have special abilities that only they can perform. I won't spoil the magic of finding out which one does but the blue tear-shaped creature can sing and the little green dude can stick to surfaces. One more game mechanic I have to explain is that when controlling a critter, you can enter a sort of 'dream' state where you may see things that weren't there in the regular 'I'm awake' state. Mixing all of these elements makes for a very well made puzzle game that requires thinking on your feet and the ability to execute properly.
Back to the art style that I was speaking about earlier, this game spews artistic skill. It is a gorgeous and vibrant game and goes great with its soundtrack. From a first glance everything may seem like too much but once you settle in, you'll get used to the sight of singing flowers with eyeballs and the talking refrigerators. Although it may seem ridiculous at first, all of the visuals seem to fit together perfectly and set the mood for the rest of the game. On the topic of the great visuals, the amazing soundtrack must be talked about. Some of my favorite moments in the game were thanks to the music that compliments the gameplay so well. The later levels in the last world are home to some of the best music that I've heard recently. The devs definitely put a lot of time and thought to the soundtrack and visuals.
The gameplay is pretty much your standard 2D puzzle platformer formula. Complete puzzles found in the stages to progress to the end. The game tries to deviate from the norm by sticking in levels that require you to use your little critters to get to the top of the stage in kind of a time trial mode where the lava (or garbage? eh) is following you up through the level. These first couple of levels actually feel threatening until you realize that when you get to a 'pod' where you can change your critter, the lava/garbage/jello stops following you until you get out of the pod. The least boring parts of the game are on the later levels where you can use all of your critters to solve complex puzzles. With that said, some of the most boring parts of the game are in the beginning where you only have 1 or 2 critters to play with, which results in a puzzle having linear solutions. The whole 'dream' state helps in putting more depth into both the platforming and puzzle side of the game, which helps distract you in the beginning when you only have the blue guy to play with. With all of these mechanics put together, you get a pretty fun 2D puzzle platformer in a world filled with mediocre 2D puzzle platformers. The game isn't reconstructing the genre but it certainly is welcome to it.
Fly'N requires precision platforming and will punish you if you fail to execute it properly. This is the difficulty that I was talking about, underneath its approachable exterior is a very challenging platformer. If you die enough times in a regular stage (by regular I mean get from point A to point B with no rush), which I must add requires a lot more deaths than in the lava stages (by lava stage I mean get from point A to point B with lava on your ass), the game will ask if you want to skip the level entirely. I guess this is to help out those who are having trouble with the game, but I found that the game telling me that I can't finish a level from a game that looks like it should have an audience of 10 year old girls, only made me angrier. With all of this said, majority of the difficulty does not come from the game itself, some does but a lot of the rage inducing parts of the game stem from the keyboard and mouse controls being just short of awful. The green dude being able to stick to walls sounds cool in theory, but I found myself not being able to turn corners properly on S+D keys and sometimes not being able to cling to said walls with right click at all. Sometimes trying to press the S or D keys to move slightly to the left or right meant instant death thanks to the way that the characters move. The other guys that I won't ruin come with special abilities that both require precision. make the later parts of the game want to rip some kind of hair from your body. I've heard that the Xbox controller is much better, but since I don't own one, I'm not able to confirm. If they made the keyboard + mouse controls as good as the controls with an Xbox controller, the game might have not been as hard, which may or may not take away from the game. Like I said, majority of the challenge come from the bad keyboard + mouse controls and not from the game itself. There are checkpoints everywhere in the level and the double jump + glide has saved me countless amounts of times. Just to explain the keyboard + mouse controls:
- S+D to move
- Left Click to jump
- W to glide in mid air
- Right Click to use special ability
- Space to enter dream state/awake state
The main game itself is around a 6-8 hour adventure, I believe there are challenge stages but once I finished the game I didn't want to use those controls again, so I haven't tried them. There is stuff to collect inside of the stages themselves, such as little seeds and use the little blue dude throughout the stages to sing to flowers which will wake up and sing back to you. Yeah I didn't understand it either. 100% the game will definitely add a couple of hours once you memorize the stages but attempting may just give me a hernia.
As a whole, the game is very well made and definitely worth the time and deserves the appreciation it gets thanks to its amazing soundtrack and art style. Everything feels natural and organic, kind of like what the little colored guys are trying to protect. The game's downfall comes down to it's mediocre keyboard + mouse controls that feel strange and unreliable half of the time. In a sea of 2D puzzle platformers, the game attempts to be different, and in some ways it does, but the gameplay doesn't set out to be different in many ways and can often feel kind of shallow.
Should you buy it or skip it? If you are a fun of 2D puzzle platformers, which is hard to not be, I would say that it is definitely worth the purchase. I myself got it for sale when it was around $2.49 I believe, but $9.99 seems like a reasonable price. With that said, if you are looking for a 2D puzzle platformer that attempts to reinvent the genre, you won't be getting that experience here so you may just have to wait for Half-Life 3: Episode 2D Puzzle Platformer Adventure (fingers crossed).
