Physics Games and Physics-Based Game Downloads

Update: The game is out! Grab it over at Walaber’s Gymnast page.

Walaber, game developer extraordinarre, has released a trailer for his next game, Gymnast. It’s looking hot!

Make sure to check out his other games, Jello Car and Walaber’s Trampoline, as well as the other games on his site. He has a forum thread here if you’d like to give him feedback.

The game is out! Play free online at:

Raptorsafari.com

And if you’re curious how I play, here’s the video of today’s #1 score:

(Rate this game! 181 votes, average: 3.25 out of 5)

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And Yet It Moves… is a conceptual game that won the 2007 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase. The first thing you’ll notice is the torn photo art, which is a fantastic way to pretty up the world without having to dedicate serious man-hours to artwork. Unfortunately the look might be my favorite part of the game. There are a lot of good ideas here, but it is quite apparent that it’s still a student project.

Wasted Potential

You’ve got a basic side-scroller with a twist: You can rotate the world around the main character at any moment in the game. Each level is a series of physics puzzles all about manipulating the world’s orientation. Great, but that’s all we really see.

Don’t get me wrong, each new obstacle demonstrates a creative reason to spin, but figuring out that reason in puzzle after puzzle is the entire game. There is no room for experimentation or play with the environment or physics. You never look at a puzzle, know the answer and also think “Oh, this will be fun to try.” Instead your thoughts are “If this takes longer than 60 seconds, it ain’t worth it.”

Crushed, Burned, and Mudered by a Swarm of Bees

There are many ways to die in And Yet It Moves and if you play it, you will surely discover them all for yourself. That’s because each puzzle is incredibly frustrating. They’re not hard to figure out; they’re tough because your little paper man is so easy to kill. He can’t fall more than 15 feet, never seems to get out of the way of boulders and if his hair catches on fire he explodes into pieces. In fact, the game would be much more interesting if you could just fall farther without dying. I kept hoping that sooner or later I’d have to spin the world to complete a clever aerial maneuver or just tip the ground down to fall to my destination instead of running. Well, go ahead and try it. You won’t get far before you’re all splattered on the bedrock.

Chemistry Games?

There is one puzzle that really caught my eye. Your path is blocked by a beehive so you bash two pieces of flint together to light a brush fire. The fire starts far from the nest, but heat rises. You must spread the fire by rotating the world, placing the next fuel source above the flame’s location. Eventually, a long wick of bushes has been burned through and the bees have been smoked out.

I appreciate that these guys managed to use fire as physical fire, not just “hurtful object D.” The idea of it takes physics simulation to another level, more like chemistry simulation. It is a kind of creative attention to detail that too many games lack.

(And Yet It Moves… Game Screenshots)

Worth Checking Out

The guys behind And Yet It Moves are obviously talented, but the game itself is lacking. Every aspect of design seems oversimplified, as if it is still in a development stage and the designers have not yet grasped the game’s possibilities. And Yet It Moves is a great place to start, but they’ll need to be more bold with their next project.

Download And Yet It Moves (12.9 MB Windows, 19.9 MB Mac OS)

Christopher J. Rock is a Flash game developer and writer.