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(1 edit)

Gravity Flip is a level-based puzzle style game where a player has to maneuver some sort of alien-frog character into hitting a portal, all under the constraints of gravity. This notion of gravity employed in the game comes in the form of the player’s movement increasing in speed once the player travels in any direction for a specific period of time. What I mean is that if you press “d” to travel right, you will travel right, and if you do not press another key within a certain amount of time, the speed of the alien-frog will severely bump up and go pretty fast (at least relative to the levels). Regarding the puzzles, these portals require a precise use of the movement to hit, all under the constraints of having the player move around barriers that if the player hits will reset the player. Moreover, the player cannot simply travel along the border of the screen since hitting the border of the screen will cause the player to reset the level as well. With this main verb of movement under the constraint of gravity comes some strategy in the rule that the gravity only severely increases the player’s speed after a specific period of time. What this means for the player is that they can strategically continue to press keys in order to change directions such that they move very slowly throughout the level since they are pressing these keys before the gravity essentially “kicks in.” Although this may seem simple, this does require some skill both due to the preciseness of the spamming of the directions in order to move slowly along with how narrow some of the paths are to hitting the portal. I found also that players can simply spam the key in the same direction that they want to move in which will also reset this timer before gravity can kick in; however, this is still not trivial as if you are not spamming the directional key consistently you will have gravity affect you and the alien-frog will speed up. Regarding the levels, the levels increase in difficulty as the player progresses through the game. Starting out with a very open level and leading up to a very narrow level not only requires the player to master the verb of gravitational movement before reaching latter levels, but it allows the player to ease into this mastery in the sense that the player can learn the movement under looser constraints and progress as they move through the levels. Overall, these five distinct levels implicitly teach the player how to control the player better, and are essentially “teaching” the player better use of the controls through progressively hardening the constraints. Beyond this, there is no story beyond the alien-frog having to move through levels along with the fact that this occurs in space. Thus, Gravity Flip is solely a level-based puzzle game that intends to allow players to solve the puzzle of hitting the portal under the constraints of gravity affecting movement.