Review: Flibbius McDoogle and the Mysterious Flying Machine – fun little exploration puzzler or tongue twister?

Flibbius McDoogle and the Mysterious Flying Machine is a short and sweet puzzle adventure that will last 1-3 hours. It follows the adventure of a turtle, Flibbius McDoogle, who has seen – shock – a mysterious flying machine in the distance.

This game plays like a 3D point-and-click. You’ll run around your environment collecting items that may be useful to you, and then you combine or use them in ways that will help tackle the obstacles around you.

Flibbius McDoogle and the Mysterious Flying Machine is interesting because, at times, it has two crafting systems. Your inventory has crafting capabilities, but objects you interact with may have one as well.

You’ll meet interesting characters and slowly find clues to discover the flying machine.

Flibbius McDoogle and the Mysterious Flying Machine: Look out, anime, this game is coming for your long title crown

In Flibbius McDoogle, you start out on your home island, running around and picking up everything that you can. Your initial goal is to get the boatman to ferry you over to the island where you last saw the flying machine. Once you finally succeed, you’ll have a small island to explore with several puzzles to figure out.

I think that Flibbius McDoogle is easy enough that kids could do the bulk of it. However, there are some combinations that you really just don’t think about. I did a lot of putting in one item and then going down the line to try and combine it with others when I was stuck.

Luckily, there are hints that will help you if you’re having a hard time, but I can’t really say how helpful they are. I didn’t want to use them because in order to 100% the achievements, you can’t use hints. So, I did what any good Steam achievement gremlin would do… I looked up a tutorial.

If you want the achievement, but you’re stuck, then you can head over to the guides section of the community hub on the Steam page. Someone did a video walkthrough and posted it.

My best advice is to pay attention to the descriptions, sometimes there are clues hidden in there like with the pokey sticks that say it looks like knitting needles. Seeing that description and the yarn in the inventory led me to a combination I wouldn’t have thought to combine.

I’d like to say that the feedback from the crafting system helps, but it only does that sometimes. At one point, it was telling me that I had one item correct, and that helped me get to the right combination. But, other times, it told me that it wasn’t wise to smash inedible berries.

There are berries in your inventory, but I wasn’t trying to use them with berries. It mostly happened with the rocks and the knife, so it’s just a little superficial dialogue error.

Berries by any other name would be… a rock?

A lot of the time, the combinations are pretty straightforward, but there were a few where I had to kind of squint and just accept that it was close enough. I can, thankfully, report that no combination was outlandishly unrealistic. 

And really, that’s your entire goal. You run around collecting things and then combine them to help the island folk. Personally, I struggled with making fire, and that’s because there were combinations I needed to make with things I already had before I could make the fire combination.

This is, technically, the kind of game where you can brute force it. Just keep adding things together, and you’ll eventually open up usable items.

I spent about 2 hours playing, and that’s because I was stalwartly refusing to use hints before I broke and looked up some help. For the time I spent, I feel like the price point is fair, especially since there were no major bugs.

The only thing I wasn’t the biggest fan of was the controls for the Xbox controller. It was weird to have the pause menu be ‘B’ and ‘RB’ to run. 

Otherwise, I had a great time with Flibbius McDoogle and the Mysterious Flying Machine. I recommend grabbing it for a quick little relaxation session. If you want to try it, you can get it over on Steam for $4.99. Otherwise, you can check out one of our other reviews, like Cornerpond. It’s a lower-thirds pseudo-idler where your little avatar will fish on your desktop while you work on other things.