By Alec Meer on March 26th, 2009 at 9:27 pm.
Ooh, you aren’t half going to like this one, unless you’re horrible. You’re not horrible, are you? It’d be a shame if you were. I picked this’un up via PC Gamer’s Twitter, which suggests the latest social networking fadette has a useful purpose after all.
And Yet It Moves is almost a meta-indie game, combining (probably coincidentally) elements of Fez, Braid, Shift, World of Goo, Gumboy and Narbacular Drop to create a beautifully-realised physics platformer with character and inspiration that’s all its own.
Additionally, it’s the Robotronesque control set turned to a whole new purpose – WASD moves your character, while the cursor keys rotate the game-world. Navigating the pseudo-hand-drawn levels escalates from simple running and jumping, through rotation to create safe egresses, to doing both at once – Portal-esque momentum-management, building up a head of steam then rotating the screen at just the right moment to ensure you land where you need to.
First time through, it’s simply about mastering the increasingly challenging levels (gravity is your major foe); second time around, it’s about speedruns, working that familiar-as-sandwiches dual-control setup with fluidity and grace to charge through with a minimum of moves and rotations.
Simplicity and cleverness in classy abundance, and that’s just from the free demo of this former student project – the full thing launches (with a pricetag- there’s 10% off Steam preorders currently) on April 2. Which is about when we’ll be writing about it at far greater length, I don’t doubt. Here’s a trailer to watch while you wait for the 37Mb demo to go through its inexplicably lengthy decompression process:
And Yet It Moves Teaser from mml on Vimeo.
26/03/2009 at 21:31 Blather Blob says:
I tried out the demo via Steam last night. I suppose it’s a deliberate part of the cut-out paper style, but I don’t like how jerky the animation is. Also, it might have been because I was playing with the keyboard, but the controls didn’t really feel smooth enough, especially with the world rotating in giant 90-degree steps. And I never really had any idea of how close I was to (the fairly low) splatter-velocity, so I felt like I had to do everything in the tiniest of steps, which made the demo both tedious and way too easy. Some of the stuff he’s doing in that trailer, for example, looks to be at least twice as far/fast as I felt like I was able to get away with before I splattered.
It’s a cool idea, and it’s worth the $13 at steam, but I just wish it was a bit smoother.
26/03/2009 at 21:39 Jazmeister says:
I came here from twitter. I liked twitter’s early albums better, though.
26/03/2009 at 21:44 BooleanBob says:
Now this… this, I like.
26/03/2009 at 22:00 DMcCool says:
I do wonder if the first sentence of this article was composed specifically to bamboozle our more American readers. I do hope so.
Now, am I the only one who feels a little teary at this final communion between WASD and the cursor keys, so long pited against eachother? That the two modes of control could set aside their differences and work together – simontaneously tells us all something about our differences, and what can happen if we put them aside.
I feel like holding hands
26/03/2009 at 22:09 The_B says:
If the internet did not have a place to hear about cat updates it would be a far sadder place to be. (I hope Ripley is feeling better, by the way.)
26/03/2009 at 22:19 Pags says:
Ironically, an impossible task while playing this game.
26/03/2009 at 22:20 roBurky says:
I’ve played freeware games with that same control scheme, and hated them. I couldn’t get my mind to latch on to which direction the world would go when I tried to turn it.
26/03/2009 at 22:24 Nighthood says:
I think I am a horrible person, this game looks pretty rubbish to me. I’ve seen flash games do the same thing, it’s really nothing that special.
26/03/2009 at 22:24 The_B says:
(Insert Rapelay gag here)
26/03/2009 at 22:39 Meh says:
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/run
26/03/2009 at 23:18 Hoernchen says:
Why has every indie game to be like LSD and I’m always the ass for not saying it’s better than blow, err, a normal game ?
26/03/2009 at 23:22 Saul says:
The controls are a bit of a mind-fuck, and the ability to remap them would be appreciated, but other that that I love it. Pre-ordered!
26/03/2009 at 23:27 M. P. says:
I’m sure I played through an early prototype of this (with very crude graphics) some months ago… And I’m pretty sure that I got linked to it from here, so I’m confused right now! The game I remember was rooms you had to get to the exit of rather than a proper platformer with large levels.
Anyway, who else thinks that the main character looks like that 7-Up mascot from the 90s?
26/03/2009 at 23:43 Clayton says:
Played this a year (more?) ago when it was a student game and wasn’t too impressed. It just felt… “clunky,” I guess, sort of moving in fits and spurts. I’m glad to see they’ve got a demo – I’ll give it another whirl; hopefully they’ve made some big improvements in the time.
26/03/2009 at 23:53 Mal says:
@Saul: You can remap the controls in Options>Keyboard then click the keys you want to remap. I found it a lot more intuitive swapping the left and right cursor keys around for the world rotation.
Nice demo. I really like the graphical style and the ambient music. I found it controlled pretty smoothly, too (once I had remapped the keys).
26/03/2009 at 23:55 cypher says:
erm. hmm. Didn’t like it. Too jerky, given the potential for frustrating tedious gameplay the controls need more finesse. Left me feeling quite ill.
Bought cannon fodder instead.
27/03/2009 at 00:14 Rob says:
For those having frame rate issues, when I turned the graphics settings down it smoothed up considerably.
27/03/2009 at 00:44 jared says:
this game is awesome, and it’s been around for at least two years; hardly a “metagame”
27/03/2009 at 01:18 plstcflsh says:
http://runhello.com/ <– jumpman, very meta-game, many similar features. addictive level editor, free, awesome. surprised its not here, i learned of it from the tigsource web log.
27/03/2009 at 03:03 Saul says:
Cheers Mal. I should probably have looked at the setting before I criticised them, but was running late for work =) I”ll probbaly swap the rotate keys and make space bar jump.
27/03/2009 at 03:10 CG says:
WOW. This is GREAT. Better than World of Goo, and I mean that. I can’t wait until the full version. This is action-puzzle gaming at its finest… at least since The Lost Vikings.
27/03/2009 at 04:54 Caiman says:
Also played this last year in its student incarnation. Neat idea, but I got frustrated on the tree level because a) too much trial and error was required and b) you’d fall off the end of structures without any indication of what was solid and what wasn’t. I’ll try the demo and see if they’ve fixed these flaws, because the student version was very much a case of a neat idea lacking a team capable of turning it into a fun game.
27/03/2009 at 06:41 Dominus says:
I still think that AYIM is a idea rip-off from this game:
http://www.limbogame.org/
It is true that Limbo never saw a release date, yet the website is there for years, someone saw the game play design and decided to do AYIM.
imho Limbo would have been 10000 times greater..
27/03/2009 at 07:18 Bob says:
The trailer makes me feel sick! So I’ll give it a miss
27/03/2009 at 08:46 PC Monster says:
I’m at work so can’t try the demo, but I have to say the trailer doesn’t really do much to get the juices flowing for this one. Will have a go tonight but so far…meh.
M.P.: “Anyway, who else thinks that the main character looks like that 7-Up mascot from the 90s?”
Lol@Fido-Dido Physics Phun!
27/03/2009 at 09:10 Ian says:
This’ll go one of two ways: It’ll either be very intuitive and soon you’ll be doing seemingly mind-boggling things as a matter of course. Or, it’ll hurt my brain and make me feel like a stupidface.
27/03/2009 at 10:37 Markoff Chaney says:
Good call Dominus. Limbo was the first thing I thought of as well. That being said, I had great fun with this demo. Worth 13 bucks and change. I’d love a level editor though. :) I mapped this to my 360 controller and it controlled pretty well. Shoulder buttons make more sense to my brain for Clockwise and Counter Clockwise for some reason…
27/03/2009 at 11:23 hydra9 says:
@plstcfsh: I was going to mention Jumpman but you beat me to it ;) Highly recommended, fiendishly difficult, but *very* inventive with a similar world-turning mechanic to this.
27/03/2009 at 12:52 Rob F says:
Aye, Jumpman does this sort of things much better and doesn’t manage to give me a headache to boot.
27/03/2009 at 13:32 Valentin Galea says:
OMFG I would donate my kidney for Limbo Game!
27/03/2009 at 15:55 Francis L says:
Thanks for the link to Jumpman! I tried both and I like it more. But slippy-slidey ice worlds? On every level? What were they thinking?
27/03/2009 at 17:57 ForTheLulz says:
“Narbuncular Drop” should be “Narbacular Drop”.
27/03/2009 at 22:31 CrazedPenguin says:
Just wanted to clarify, the game has been out for a looong time. I first remember playing it maybe 2 years or so ago.
28/03/2009 at 04:33 Mark says:
Be advised: according to the Steam page, even the demo has SecuROM.
28/03/2009 at 04:34 Mark says:
Uh, whoops. Disregard that. Commented on the wrong article.
28/03/2009 at 14:12 Rei Onryou says:
Now why didn’t the Sonic games go in this direction?
29/03/2009 at 23:15 Hmm-Hmm. says:
@Dominus:
Now that looks fascinating, instead of merely interesting like ‘And yet it moves’.
30/03/2009 at 22:50 hydra9 says:
@Francis L:
Jumpman is most definitely a hardcore game… too difficult for me, actually, even with infinite lives :) Still a great game, though.
Re: ‘And Yet It Moves.’ I just played through the demo, quite liked it, not sure if it’s interesting enough to buy though. Plus now I’ve quit the game, I feel kinda queasy. I’m typing this and it feels like my words should be
falling
down
the
screen
05/04/2009 at 15:18 Campana says:
The animation doesn’t feel jerky to me at all, all very smooth. I don’t normally play this kind of thing but found the paper world, and the papery music and sound effects kind of…compelling. Something to do while I drink my coffee in the morn…uh…early afternoon.
05/04/2009 at 18:46 UDM says:
I like it too. The demo was a bit jerky for me, but then it’s because I’m running on old back-up hardware due to a fried graphics card
Will I buy it? Definitely