Fly'N

I keep a short mental list of small games that got buried the year they launched and deserved far better. Fly'N sits near the top of it. Built by a team of nine people inside Ankama, the studio better known for the Wakfu and Dofus MMOs, it arrived in late 2012 and quietly earned an 80 on Metacritic and 92% positive Steam user reviews before the algorithm stopped caring. The tragedy is that the game itself is quietly extraordinary, and most people reading this have probably never heard of it. The core loop is a puzzle-platformer built around four distinct creatures called Buds, each with an ability that reshapes how you read a level. Flyn sings to wake dormant plants and transfer Helys, balls of sap-energy, through the environment. Lyft wall-sticks to almost any surface. Ywok inflates into an invincible bouncy ball and rolls through hazards that would destroy the others. Nyls freezes mid-air and then launches himself like a javelin. Checkpoints double as character-swap stations, so levels organically become little combinatorial puzzles: bring Ywok through the red-spike section, then swap to Flyn to sing a path open on the far side. When Ankama layers that character-switching with the game's other big idea, the Innate and Subtle vision modes, it starts to feel genuinely inventive. Innate vision gives you solid platforms and vivid colour. Subtle flips the logic: platforms dissolve, cloud wisps become walkable, and wind streams carry you laterally. Switching between them mid-run, chasing a pollen cluster that only exists in one dimension, is the kind of mechanic that a much larger studio would have patented and sequelised to death. The art deserves its own paragraph because it earns it. Reviewers at the time compared it to Botanicula's fauna and Patapon's bold outlines, and both references hold. Everything in Fly'N has enormous, expressive eyes. The environments shift from lush canopy greens to near-neon dream-world palettes depending on which vision mode you are in. The soundtrack leans synth and organic at once, the kind of score that sits in your peripheral awareness and makes the whole experience feel softer than it actually is, because the difficulty is real. The back half of the game's forty levels across five World-Trees will test your timing on double-jumps, mid-air redirects, and precise glide control. Player feedback consistently notes that the difficulty ramps earlier than expected, and there is no difficulty slider. If your platformer reflexes are average, expect some friction in the later trees. One specific criticism worth flagging: keyboard-and-mouse controls are noticeably awkward for the more reflex-heavy moments. A controller is not optional, it is strongly recommended. Where the game falls a little short of its own potential is in how evenly it distributes its best ideas. The puzzles that require you to combine multiple Buds and layer in vision-shifting are Fly'N at its ceiling, but the game does not reach that ceiling as often as you wish it would. Some mid-game sections coast on single-Bud traversal that feels routine next to the peaks. The collectathon side, chasing pollen counts and post-level scores for Steam leaderboard placement, appeals to a narrower audience than the core game, and some of the secret-level unlock conditions lean frustrating. None of this sinks it. The six-to-eight-hour runtime is well-paced for what it is, and the game absolutely knows when to end. For the right player, and you know who you are if you read this far, Fly'N is the kind of small, handmade thing that stays with you longer than games ten times its budget. The soundscape alone is worth a quiet afternoon.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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