Kitty Hawk

I want to love Kitty Hawk, because the seed of it is genuinely sweet. You strap on a SteamVR headset, hold a tracked controller in each hand, and physically flap your arms to generate lift. The character you inhabit is a cat with cardboard wings cutting through a neon-lit, retro-futuristic sky. That image alone deserves some affection. The problem is that the game arrived in Early Access in January 2018, received a small handful of patches adding things like a UFO obstacle and an updated scoring system, and then went completely silent. The last developer update is well over seven years old at this point. What was promised as a one-to-two-year development cycle simply never completed. In its current state, Kitty Hawk is a survival score-chaser. You fly as long as possible, dodge fireball-hurling monkeys and space bats, collect gems to rack up points, and hit the trigger on your controller for a speed boost when you need to escape a tight spot. The leaderboard is there, which gives you something to chase, and the arm-flapping control scheme is accessible enough that you do not need to windmill yourself into exhaustion to stay airborne. The motion-to-lift translation is forgiving, which is the right call for a casual VR experience aimed at newcomers. The world itself is where good intentions run out of runway. The environment reads as a collection of glowing geometric shapes suspended against a dark backdrop, and the neon palette that was meant to suggest a dreamy inter-dimensional paradise instead underlines just how sparse the geometry is. The play area is bounded tightly, so any instinct to soar into the distance hits an invisible wall fast. The obstacles, while imaginative on paper, do not vary enough to sustain attention past the first few runs. There is no unlockable cat roster, no in-game currency loop, none of the upgrades that were listed in the original Early Access roadmap. Those features were planned. They simply never shipped. For VR newcomers in 2018, something this straightforward had real appeal as a demo-night crowd-pleaser, the kind of thing you hand to a skeptical relative and watch them immediately understand. In 2025, that window has closed. The SteamVR ecosystem has matured considerably, compatibility with some headsets is reportedly unreliable, and there are genuinely finished VR flying experiences available that provide actual progression and polish. Kitty Hawk is not a scam, it is an abandoned sketch, and there is a difference worth acknowledging. The core flapping mechanic works. The atmosphere, however thin, has a quiet retro charm. But charm alone cannot paper over a game that stopped growing before it became one.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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