Fly In The House Review
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The premise of Fly in the House is in the title; there’s a fly in your house and your objective is to kill it… by any means necessary. Published by KISS Ltd. and developed by a sole developer Mykhail Konokh, you enter your apartment, looking back on your life until you’re greeted with the familiar sound of a fly. You get a sudden burst of anger and go about finding innumerable ways to kill the fly within a certain amount of time. When first hearing the premise of the story, it immediately brought to mind the classic “Fly†episode of Breaking Bad, the initial existential statements the character makes strengthened the connection, but that’s as far as it gets to being anything enticing. It’s a parody game in the vein of Goat Simulator, I Am Bread and the like, unfortunately never once in my time with Fly in the House did I feel like I was having fun.Â
Generic rock plays throughout the house, reflecting the anger your character feels, and breaking objects occasionally generates equally generic sounds. I quickly found myself muting the rock track, if you want to set the mood, you’re better off setting up your own soundtrack in the background. The art style is as basic as it can get, the shapes are there enough to give you an impression of what the object is but never get any more detailed than that.
While most modern games tend to instruct you on the controls as you get into it, you’ll get no such help here. Instead, you will have to resort to the very basic menu to get onto the help page and instantly memorize the controls, at the very least it’s easy to get to it and back to the gameplay.
Soon enough, your focus moves away from trying to kill the fly and simply becomes trying to break as many objects as you can. There’s a certain lack of physics to the game, tossing the flat screen television didn’t do anything, nor the vase along with numerous other objects in the house. Grabbing onto objects was equally hard, you have to find the sweet spot with your cursor to grab the object, sometimes even moving around or finding a way to physically rotate it by pushing onto it. At first I thought I had the control scheme wrong but it was just a matter of unresponsive gameplay.
Fortunately, I soon discovered two stereos with some weight to them and it allowed me to break most things in the house while staying mostly intact. I managed to form a camaraderie with them not unlike Tom Hanks and Wilson the volleyball had in Castaway. There was also fun to be had when I managed to break the window and discovered I could toss objects out. Televisions, couches, toilets, sinks, and even fridges went skydiving from the apartment window, I tried to join them but that wasn’t possible. Kudos to the developer for adding screams to invisible onlookers from down below, though there were about four or five different screams and they quickly began cycling through one another.
There are three levels in total in the story mode, beyond the house itself, there’s the office and the castle. With the story mode limiting you to a timer, you’ll need to go to arcade mode to complete the special objectives such as getting 1000 points –meaning breaking every single object in the house, finding secret objects, and getting certain titles such as strongman in order to make it to the next level. If you have the time and determination then you could genuinely spend five hours if not ten hours unlocking everything the game demands of you, particularly because the goals needed to reach for the next level tend to be time consuming.
At the time of this writing, Fly in the House is available for CDN $10.99, it’s not worth that value. Fly in the House comes across less as a parody game and more like a developer trying his hands at development for the first time, or simply trying to make some quick cash. There are plenty of other ways you could spend those 11$ on, particularly more refined parody games if that’s what you’re looking for. It simply doesn’t come across as if Fly in the House’s developer put any effort into making this a fun way to spend your time. If you do decide to go ahead and get your hands on this, it’ll generally take you about half an hour to regret the buy and realize there are better ways to spend your time.
Fly in the House has potential to at least be an easy way to relieve stress but it’ll have to refine the gameplay mechanics, make it easier to interact with objects and lessen the stretch goals to unlock new levels if it doesn’t want to generate stress itself. At the moment though, I’d likely find more entertainment in hunting down a literal fly in my house then I do hunting it in this game.