User Review: And Yet It Moves Demo Version
For the uninformed, or simply uninterested among you, the title And Yet It Moves is also a quote attributed to Galileo upon being put under house arrest by the catholic church and refers to the heliocentric solar system theory, in which Earth, a spherical body (an idea which had been widely excepted some centuries before), orbits around the Sun, and not the geocentric theory the catholic church insisted on. What, pray tell, does this have to do with video games, you may ask. Well a somewhat tenuous link is established between title and game play in that the hook, or gimmick if the disparaging among you would prefer, for this game is that you can rotate the world and gravity in 90 degree increments around your character.
The game itself is an idea almost as old as the heliocentric universe: a PC platformer. Shock horror, I know, they still make them for the PC! It is not a genre confined to the tiny insignificant processing power of the Nintendo DS or Wii. The only successful, in my opinion, platformer of recent times is Little Big Planet (please don't bother contacting me about others, this is after all an opinion piece and highly subjective) which is most appealing to children barely old enough to hold up their own heads and people who like collecting shiny useless trinkets for their user designed hackey sac with legs, and Ravens, I suppose. So why would a game developer, even an indie one on limited budget, regress into this defunct field? I'll tell you, and you will heed it! Because its fun while being exceptionally frustrating.
As you may remember the only objective of a platformer is to get from A to B. The twist; in And Yet It Moves B is as likely to be on the roof as anywhere else. While it is essentially a one path game, the orientation of the path as you try and walk along it is entirely up to you, so you may walk on the path, on the roof, or fall in between the roof and path and explode into pieces when you find the wall which now seems to be where you thought you left the floor. The real beauty in the game is trying to find novel and fast ways to traverse the level while manipulating the world around you to facilitate this. It has the easy to learn, hard to master feel painted all over it, which is created because it will keep you coming back over and over trying to find faster and more interesting ways to tackle it.
There are two fold reasons why you will be trying to find faster ways to cross the level. The first is, ostensibly, that the full game features online score boards to compare your times. You can even recruit the ghosts of other players for you to chase around the level like a cat chasing a laser pen. The second, which after even a short time of play is the far more pressing reason, is that the paper cut out boy (paperboy?!) you control is very slow! This becomes quite infuriating very quickly, it also leads to the controls feeling a little stodgy because my FPS reflexes are tuned to breaking point. The nice thing about this is that if you play for a little longer you will find clever ways to avoid walking at all, because, as all who have fallen down the stairs know, gravity is great at doing the job for us. You will also find that much like when you fall down the stairs and knock yourself unconscious, the paperboy is somewhat fragile and will explode into pieces if he falls too far.
The biggest sticking point I have with the game play is some of the jumping physics. After such a promisingly well informed title, they show blatant disregard for one of Galileo's successors and completely disregard Newton's first law of motion: conservation of momentum. Allow me to elaborate. I am running along the floor and jump to the right, I rotate the screen 180 degrees so I can land on the roof (the paper boy stops moving while this happens), when he begins moving again he is now falling towards the roof, as you would expect, but he is also moving right on the screen again! My brain nearly exploded the first time I tried this and it caused me to fall into the middle of nothing. For those of you who missed the trick, he should have been moving left on the inverted screen. Anyway this may not remotely bother the less puritanical gamers and it is a relatively small sticking point to which you will soon adapt, so you don't throw yourself off a cliff again.
The camera is a very basic entity, so it doesn't do much wrong, however it zooms quite far in sometimes, which is kind of annoying as it would be nice to have a bigger picture of where you are trying to go. That would allow some real creativity. Having said that I'm sure the camera zoom is deliberately restricting your vision in some cases, and the rest of the time it is helpfully zoomed to focus you on the particular obstacle at hand.
The art and level settings are relatively basic, but still quite good looking in parts. The art is based on torn up paper in various styles, so you may find yourself against a torn off edge of paper which if you cross you literally fall off the world blatantly a joke for the flat earth theorists. Now do you see why I made the point about Earth being spherical? Haha...No? Anyway the art is nothing to write home about and your character paperboy is literally a white paper cut out with some vague resemblance to the Fat Face Logo [http://www.scopper.co.uk/quiz/logopictures/55.jpg]. But it doesn't matter, because the game would be no better if it were ran through the 3D 'realism' rendering physics engine, which would presumably turn paperboy into a brown paper Rambo.
How far can they go with this game? The developers have been quite creative in the puzzles they give you and I'm sure the full game has many more to offer, so the novelty of rotating gravity is slow to wear off. A cautionary note; there is one puzzle in the demo involving feeding an ape a banana, which I found annoying and not in the least bit entertaining. It broke the flow of the game quite conclusively because the real fun is in seamlessly stringing together a transition from floor to ceiling to wall and back again and knowing that it was all you and not a quick time event shackled into the physics engine. If the full game largely avoids these puzzles it will be great fun end to end!
Verdict: Play the demo, its definitely worth it. I will be buying the full game and recommend it to you too!
Andy (Megalomania)
P.S First review, feedback encouraged!
For the uninformed, or simply uninterested among you, the title And Yet It Moves is also a quote attributed to Galileo upon being put under house arrest by the catholic church and refers to the heliocentric solar system theory, in which Earth, a spherical body (an idea which had been widely excepted some centuries before), orbits around the Sun, and not the geocentric theory the catholic church insisted on. What, pray tell, does this have to do with video games, you may ask. Well a somewhat tenuous link is established between title and game play in that the hook, or gimmick if the disparaging among you would prefer, for this game is that you can rotate the world and gravity in 90 degree increments around your character.
The game itself is an idea almost as old as the heliocentric universe: a PC platformer. Shock horror, I know, they still make them for the PC! It is not a genre confined to the tiny insignificant processing power of the Nintendo DS or Wii. The only successful, in my opinion, platformer of recent times is Little Big Planet (please don't bother contacting me about others, this is after all an opinion piece and highly subjective) which is most appealing to children barely old enough to hold up their own heads and people who like collecting shiny useless trinkets for their user designed hackey sac with legs, and Ravens, I suppose. So why would a game developer, even an indie one on limited budget, regress into this defunct field? I'll tell you, and you will heed it! Because its fun while being exceptionally frustrating.
As you may remember the only objective of a platformer is to get from A to B. The twist; in And Yet It Moves B is as likely to be on the roof as anywhere else. While it is essentially a one path game, the orientation of the path as you try and walk along it is entirely up to you, so you may walk on the path, on the roof, or fall in between the roof and path and explode into pieces when you find the wall which now seems to be where you thought you left the floor. The real beauty in the game is trying to find novel and fast ways to traverse the level while manipulating the world around you to facilitate this. It has the easy to learn, hard to master feel painted all over it, which is created because it will keep you coming back over and over trying to find faster and more interesting ways to tackle it.
There are two fold reasons why you will be trying to find faster ways to cross the level. The first is, ostensibly, that the full game features online score boards to compare your times. You can even recruit the ghosts of other players for you to chase around the level like a cat chasing a laser pen. The second, which after even a short time of play is the far more pressing reason, is that the paper cut out boy (paperboy?!) you control is very slow! This becomes quite infuriating very quickly, it also leads to the controls feeling a little stodgy because my FPS reflexes are tuned to breaking point. The nice thing about this is that if you play for a little longer you will find clever ways to avoid walking at all, because, as all who have fallen down the stairs know, gravity is great at doing the job for us. You will also find that much like when you fall down the stairs and knock yourself unconscious, the paperboy is somewhat fragile and will explode into pieces if he falls too far.
The biggest sticking point I have with the game play is some of the jumping physics. After such a promisingly well informed title, they show blatant disregard for one of Galileo's successors and completely disregard Newton's first law of motion: conservation of momentum. Allow me to elaborate. I am running along the floor and jump to the right, I rotate the screen 180 degrees so I can land on the roof (the paper boy stops moving while this happens), when he begins moving again he is now falling towards the roof, as you would expect, but he is also moving right on the screen again! My brain nearly exploded the first time I tried this and it caused me to fall into the middle of nothing. For those of you who missed the trick, he should have been moving left on the inverted screen. Anyway this may not remotely bother the less puritanical gamers and it is a relatively small sticking point to which you will soon adapt, so you don't throw yourself off a cliff again.
The camera is a very basic entity, so it doesn't do much wrong, however it zooms quite far in sometimes, which is kind of annoying as it would be nice to have a bigger picture of where you are trying to go. That would allow some real creativity. Having said that I'm sure the camera zoom is deliberately restricting your vision in some cases, and the rest of the time it is helpfully zoomed to focus you on the particular obstacle at hand.
The art and level settings are relatively basic, but still quite good looking in parts. The art is based on torn up paper in various styles, so you may find yourself against a torn off edge of paper which if you cross you literally fall off the world blatantly a joke for the flat earth theorists. Now do you see why I made the point about Earth being spherical? Haha...No? Anyway the art is nothing to write home about and your character paperboy is literally a white paper cut out with some vague resemblance to the Fat Face Logo [http://www.scopper.co.uk/quiz/logopictures/55.jpg]. But it doesn't matter, because the game would be no better if it were ran through the 3D 'realism' rendering physics engine, which would presumably turn paperboy into a brown paper Rambo.
How far can they go with this game? The developers have been quite creative in the puzzles they give you and I'm sure the full game has many more to offer, so the novelty of rotating gravity is slow to wear off. A cautionary note; there is one puzzle in the demo involving feeding an ape a banana, which I found annoying and not in the least bit entertaining. It broke the flow of the game quite conclusively because the real fun is in seamlessly stringing together a transition from floor to ceiling to wall and back again and knowing that it was all you and not a quick time event shackled into the physics engine. If the full game largely avoids these puzzles it will be great fun end to end!
Verdict: Play the demo, its definitely worth it. I will be buying the full game and recommend it to you too!
Andy (Megalomania)
P.S First review, feedback encouraged!
