Flight of the Hummingbird

This game was started out of leftover, difficult to code puzzles from another game and grew into something more. You play a flight-capable superhero who must stop an evil villains plot.

You can fly to a variety of altitudes, and many of the puzzles depend on this. The very first puzzle through me for a real loop, as there is a trick to flight that you are supposed to discover on your own, with some hints when you fail.

The storyline is a bit thin, with most of the exciting parts passed over. It really seems like more of a technical exercise that grew a story rather than a story with deep implementation. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Overall, recommended for superhero fans.

Flight of the Hummingbird is a sort of attempt to blend platformer-style puzzles in an IF format. All of its puzzles are to do with difficult or unusual ways of getting around. Most involve alternative ways of handling space than the standard IF rooms-and-compass method. While some of these experiments seem potentially interesting, none are developed much beyond the point at which the player can grasp their use.

The fictional content is pretty standard fare: you play a third-string superhero with a kind of feeble theme and an unimpressive power (you can fly, but have to chug sugary sports drinks every few turns). You're tasked with dealing with a third-string supervillain with a campy villainous plan of some kind that requires a space rocket; everybody expects you to screw up. This is a pretty well-established comedy premise, so it needs to be really funny to work: ideally, it would have played on the careenings of the navigation puzzles to produce something wildly slapstick. Flight's writing, however, is more workmanlike than anything, and the comedy falls flat. What remains is a My Pathetic Life narrative, which turns out to be no more appealing with superheroes than in My Apartment.

So the ultimate effect of Flight is of something that was designed as a succession of themed puzzles with a narrative skin, rather than something that marries puzzle and narrative together. It may appeal as a quick puzzlebox, if that's your bag: it's not really mine.