Backwards Gravity by Elig
Download (Windows Binary)
Guest reviewer Darren Grey (http://gruesomegames.com/blog)
To call Backwards Gravity incomplete would be an understatement. To call it a game might be an overstatement. It?s clear that there?s the beginning of a game there, with an interesting core concept, but ultimately it?s nowhere near completion and utterly riddled with bugs. Sorry to sound overly harsh, but I don?t think the game should have been released in this state.
Backwards Gravity does have a unique and fairly cool gameplay element. You can only move left and right, with ?j? for jump allowing you to move in the vertical axis. Which direction you jump in depends on whether you?re against an up or down facing wall, and gravity will always make you fall back the way you came. The levels are made of little platforms and lots of empty space, so the objective is to jump around and try to navigate yourself towards the exit. It takes a lot of getting used to, but the mechanic is very interesting and fun, and makes you feel a lot like an astronaut floating about in space.
There are enemies in the game which move towards you (and run away if they get very injured). You can kill them, but there?s no reason to unless they?re in your way since they can?t attack you or harm you in any way. There?s basically just moving obstacles, one of the game?s many evidences of incompletion.
Further fault can be found in the buggy and badly designed display. Long lines of ^ or @ characters sometimes appear without reason. The message line prints on the top row of the map, obscuring any map content there. In spite of using curses there is no colour and your darling ?@? character is almost impossible to find on the map since the cursor is never placed over it. The map limits at the top interfere with jumping, which makes the game much harder near the edges and quite annoyingly got me stuck in an unwinnable situation (see the screenshot ? it?s impossible to jump onto the top ledge). With all these bugs and a complete lack of real content this doesn’t really classify as a real game in my books.
For all my negativity I do hope to see further work done on this, because the gravity/jumping mechanic is quite interesting, and with the right additions it could be a very fun game. As it stands though this isn?t worth playing.
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