A World Where Up Has No Meaning
(Rate this game! 181 votes, average: 3.25 out of 5)
Loading...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)
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- Physics in Casual Games, Caramba Deluxe
My name is Matthew Wegner, and this site is dedicated to physics games.
on January 26th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Looks great! I downloaded it when it first came out, but I could not get it to run on my old computer. I should try it out now!
on January 26th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
I thought this game was a little gem. Nice art direction and an interesting concept. I didn’t think the execution was bad, though the game did get a little frustrating.
on January 26th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
I don’t like it.
on January 26th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
see also FarCry 2 for the fire effects: In a demo they used a flamethrower to burn some savanna and as the wind changed, the fire went another way until it reached some gas tank resulting in a big explosion (huh, well. why do they create complex stuff like that for ego-shooters? nobody cares if you die when shot in your cap as long as the weapons are “realistic”, see the laughable “physics puzzles” in HalfLife2…)
I think the game could be cooler still if the world could be freely rotated instead of steps right angles. Or, but that would maybe be too different, use the analog stick of a controller to set the direction of gravity and its strength (ie, zero position=zero gravity)
on January 27th, 2008 at 8:08 am
I approve. Your review set my expectations very low, but for a student project, without budget, for a competition, I was impressed. I found the gameplay challenging to the mind and the fingers for a few minutes, and I was pleased to score well on both levels once I grew used to the processor of flipping gravity as I run and jump.
An entertaining 840seconds and 24 deaths well spent =)
on January 27th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
How do I get past that fucking gorilla? :(
on January 27th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Beat it. Killed that fucking gorilla ass with gravity. >:D
on January 27th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
“Download And Yet It Movies” xD
Kinda cool game, played it but got too annoyed by my character always dying from falling…I love the sound effects though :)
on January 28th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Nice art. Liked the way jungle leaves were animated and other little details. Nothing new when it comes to freely adjustable gravity in 2D platformer, though. Unfortunately this is below average in that respect.
on January 29th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
“Baron Von Puttyngton vs. The Cancerous M.C. Escher Maze” was funnier. And had more physics.
on February 3rd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
I know i’m not the only one, but since no one else is commenting on this… IT WON’T WORK FOR ME!!!!! After the download and everything, i click the app and some weird music plays and nothing else. No menu, not even an error message, just a couple of notes of music. I saw other forums where people had this problem, so i just thought i’d put that out there in case anyone knew what to do.