Throughout the world of the game, players can encounter many abstract and nonsensical things, such as a floating monk, a sumo wrestler, and a man tiling bricks to make the sky, revealing a starry backdrop behind them.

In an interview, van Meter said that he created Fly Guy because he felt that people with jobs wanted to escape, so he built a Flash game around that idea.

[6] Time magazine listed Fly Guy as one of their favorite websites of 2004, calling it "A delightful bit of interactive flash" and "not a bad place to be".

[7] The New York Observer's Very Short List called it "whimsical and deceptively simple".

[8] On July 29, 2016, Fly Guy was re-released on mobile platforms and was available for iOS and Android.