A mildly innovative 2D platformer where you get to run away from a giant horned hamster. Otherwise, a bloody bore.
I'm sure that many a gaming enthusiast would remember playing Commander Keen, the original Duke Nukem games, Flashback, Blackthorne, and perhaps Abe's Odyssey.
Sadly, the PC 2D platformer genre was left in the nineties along with VCRs, terrible techno music, and bad fashion sense. Sure, it reemerged its head with 2002's Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project (a classical genre game if there ever was one) but that didn't really help to change the genre's status quo.
Now, with the emergence of DLC and on-line distribution systems like Steam, which make bypassing the tedious business of working with an official brick-and-mortar publisher all that much easier, quite a few indie developers have turned to the good old 2D platformer as the genre of choice for entering the scene. And Yet It Moves is one of those games. For better or worse.
--- Paper Man's Bad Trip ---
This game descended from the snowy Alps of the country that brought us Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Pez candy, and Apfelstrudel. Developed by a team of four, And Yet It Moves started as a game design project at the Vienna University of Technology.
Historical details aside, the game is a two dimensional platformer where you control a paper cut-out character with the sole goal of getting from point A to point B. (Just think of watching a child proceed through the educational system). There are no enemies per se, no power-ups, no weapons, no plot. You just run (and occasionally jump) from where you're at to where you're supposed to be.
What stops it from being infinitely boring is that the game's main gameplay element relies on the fact that apart from controlling your Paper Man you can also control the world around you. The Up, Down, Left, and Right keys rotate the game world 90 degrees in the direction you specify. This effectively allows you to run on walls, ceilings, and so forth. It also accounts for the undocumented feature of getting an occasional headache, but that's beside the point.
Two points for rodents of unusual size.
I bet that when they first saw this design, the professors at the Vienna University of Technology were very impressed. Mostly, because they've probably never seen a game like Echochrome, but nonetheless.
Apart from timing jumps and world rotations, the game also throws a few puzzles at you time to time. The majority of these involve rotating the world in such a way so as make object X fall on object Y. Most of these are nothing special, but there is one notable moment where Paper Man gets chased by a giant horned hamster. In fact, that's probably the most awesome moment of the game.
High scores for fast level completion can be posted on the internet as proof of your MASTERSTROKE TECHNIQUES, and the game throws a Steam achievement at you time to time. The MASTERSTRIKERS better be amused.
--- A View From The Side ---
All the backgrounds are stylized as paper and cardboard decorations done in a hallucinogenic palette. In a striking resemblance to your local congressman, the main character is a paper cut-out with crazy hair and moving parts attached at the joints, and the local fauna is represented mostly as animated photographs. Strangely enough, it all comes together quite nicely, and holds well with the gameplay that And Yet It Moves has to offer.
Sound and music, however minimalistic, are on par with the visuals.
And yet, even though everything in this game seems to fit, everything seems to be fine, the game definitely qualifying for what one may call a success, I again and again found myself looking for external distractions. Other video games, slaying ninjas, eating beef jerky, - anything - to find an excuse to do something other than having to sit down and continue on with Paper Man's linear adventures for the sake of an honest review.
--- The Rocky Grave of Paper ---
Even before I got to midgame, I realized that And Yet It Moves shares a lot of common ground with the before mentioned Apfelstrudel - delicious-looking, rather popular, and yet I've had to force myself through it out of a misplaced sense of civic duty.
I completely support the notion that you do not need great special effects and multimillion dollar budgets to make entertaining video games, but with this in mind, all gamers (just like real people) are different. What one may like the other may hate. I don't hate this game, but that's also about as far on the "like" scale as I will go.
Perhaps the reason that the game failed to hold my attention is that I found it to be ultimately pointless. There is no plot, there is no reason why I should lead Paper Man from a level's beginning to a level end, and there is no flamethrower in sight with which I could do some pointless mayhem. And in a game about paper, the absence of a flamethrower is quite a major no-no. In fact, this is probably one of the least violent games I've ever played. The worst what can happen is that on your character's death, Paper Man would break apart at the joints and sort of fly all other the place.
To sum things up, And Yet It Moves is technically sound. It's even entertaining if you can force yourself to continue playing it. But personally, I found it to be a BLOODY BORE.
My advice is to consider getting the game if you're into the indie game scene, or are looking for something different (not to be confused with better) than your run-of-the-mill platformer for just a tenner. But if you're like me and play computer games to kick arse and blow stuff up, you'll probably want call this one a pass.