Project Super makes the damage you cause part of the rescue

You patrol a city that runs on emergencies rather than a mission list: robberies in progress, civilians who need lifting out of somewhere, calls that arrive while you are already busy with something else. The verbs are fly, catch, carry, land. None of that is unusual on its own. What is unusual is that the difficulty has been aimed at the flying rather than at the villains.

The pitch is explicit about it — crash into buildings, flatten a hot dog stand, launch a criminal through someone’s living room. Those are not failure states that end a run. They are outcomes the city notices and adds to your file. The distance between a heroic entrance and a human missile is a landing you either nail or you do not, and the game is built to keep that gap wide.

That reframes what a superpower is. In most games power is a permission slip: once you can fly, flying stops being a decision. Here altitude, speed and stopping distance are all things you are managing under time pressure, with a person in your arms and a building in the way.

Progression follows the same logic. You start as an unknown, earn the public’s trust, and unlock bigger districts and tougher emergencies as the rating climbs — so the reward for getting good at flight is more city to get it wrong in. There is co-op as well as single-player, which means the collateral damage can also be someone else’s.

Does Spidey’s Web-Swinging Make You Feel Like Spider-Man? is the essay to argue with here. It makes the case that swinging feels right because it is deliberately easy — speed, animation and flow carry you from the first pull of the trigger, and mastery is optional. Project Super takes the opposite bet: the fantasy is not competence, it is enormous power in the hands of someone with no practice. Both are legitimate, and the essay is useful precisely because it names what this game is giving up to get its comedy.

Morality in the Mechanics argues that karma meters flatten ethics, and that the sharper moral design lives inside systems the player is already using. A Hero Rating is a karma meter by another name, so everything turns on what feeds it. If it responds to dialogue choices, it is exactly the flattening the essay warns about. If it only ever responds to physics — what you hit, how hard, and who was standing there — then the meter is an honest readout of the flight model, and the moral pressure is coming from the controls instead of from a menu.

What Mirror’s Edge Catalyst Should Have Learned From Burnout Paradise is the open-city half. Its point is that a sandbox only pays off when the events, the routes, the navigation and the mastery all run through the same system. That is the test for this one: the emergencies have to be reachable by flying well, findable by flying around, and hard for the same reasons flying is hard. If the rescues become separate scripted scenes, the city goes back to being scenery you commute over.

Project Super is by Studio BitDot, self-published, listed under Action, Adventure, Indie and Simulation, and coming to Windows. Steam has no date on it yet. Alongside single-player it lists co-op and online co-op, which for a game about accidental destruction is the more interesting half.

The loop is legible from the store page alone: patrol, respond, break something, get scored, unlock a bigger district. That is enough structure to stop an open city turning into an empty one, and it has the good sense to put the score on the part of the game you actually touch.

If flattening a city with superpowers is the appeal, YOU ARE THE MONSTER is the other one on this list — the same physical destruction with the scoring reversed. Project Super is what that game looks like when the wreckage counts against you.