And Yet It Moves

3 Gravity puzzling with some new ideas
And Yet It Moves is a gravity game. The idea itself has been explored many times, and I was somewhat sceptical on what the game could offer more. The gameplay focuses on rotating the camera by 90 degrees and thus changing the direction of gravity, while maintaining momentum and avoiding too high velocities. The team managed to pull a large number of interesting mechanics from this, and surprised me warmly: I didn’t think there would be so many different ways gravity could be used. This impressed me for the first levels, and even a bit later on, but eventually turned repetive: the main gameplay idea ages a bit badly towards the end and you will find yourself slightly bored.

The graphics are, first, mostly photos attached to flat surfaces. I didn’t find these too appealing, but later on the later levels offer something a bit more artistic. The character animation looks smooth enough. Occasionally the way the foreground art is rendered causes some difficulty understanding where you are, but this is by no means a frequent issue. There are some interesting touches such as the background art animating based on the way the player moves, sometimes using this for gameplay mechanics as well.

I don’t think there was a story, or if there was I missed it. This is a game focusing entirely on the game mechanics and level design, attempting to offer a small labyrinth from which the player tries to escape. If one really tries he might be able to figure out some kind of artistic meaning from the combination of background art and the music, but I don’t think this was the point at all.

The music is varying from somewhat beat-ish ambience to obscure sounds with some rhythmic patterns. This didn’t quite hit my mood, and wasn’t too exciting. Someone else might find this very fitting for the theme of the game.

The game itself plays very smoothly. I didn’t hit any bugs at all, except for some bad clipping and skipping when moving the character so that it was in very tight spaces. Occasionally you could land safely from very high velocities by turning the camera just as the right moment, but this seemed too random to be employed as a way around the puzzles.

3 stars. Play if you want one more gravity puzzle game with a somewhat large number of interesting ideas. Length of the game is about 2 hours (not including bonus modes).