Flip's Twisted World Hands-On

Flip's Twisted World's charming aesthetic was what originally stood out when we went to visit Majesco during the Electronic Entertainment Expo. This puzzle platformer is aimed at the core platforming audience who enjoy a good challenge. Even though the game was still in its early stages, it has a lot of potential with its creative and unique ideas.

Who's Making This Game: Indie developer Frozen North Productions, based out of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada is the mastermind behind Flip's Twisted World. This was just one of several Majesco games that were being displayed at E3.

What the Game Looks Like: The 3D visuals will immediately attract your attention because they are colorful and kid-friendly, looking very much like what you would find in a Mario game. There are five different worlds to explore, each with its own unique theme. What really stood out were the level designs; each world has multiple rooms consisting of floating platforms.

What There Is to Do: You play as the young apprentice named Flip, whose master refuses to teach him any magic. While cleaning your master's forbidden magical objects, you somehow get sucked into a bizarre world with strange creatures. You encounter this magical cube that lets you rotate the world at 90 degrees. This opens up new paths and lets you walk on virtually any surface. There's plenty of exploration and secrets to discover in this platformer, and you pick up new powers--such as a freeze spell or even a taser--in every level.

How the Game Is Played: Flip is controlled with the analog stick, and you jump with the A button. The Wii Remote is used to thwart enemies by shaking it, or you can use the Nunchuk as well. By holding the B button, you can rotate the remote in any direction to change the view of the world. Rotating yourself into oblivion is not encouraged. But before you let go of the B button during a rotation, arrows will indicate what direction you're about to rotate in, which will give you a clue as to whether or not it's a safe decision. There will be times when you need to rotate quickly while dodging enemies, so you'll have to think fast and wrap your mind around this peculiar feature. We encountered a lot of clever and devious puzzles, which we won't share because part of the fun is figuring it out.

What They Say: Julian Spillane of Frozen North Productions said, "We're trying to tackle the core platformer demographic for this game because there haven't been a lot of solid platformers for the Wii except for Mario Galaxy. We wanted to make something unique and interesting."

What We Say: We really enjoyed Flip's Twisted World because it's a clever idea and is implemented really well. The camera follows your character closely, without doing anything weird or out of the ordinary. You also have full control of the camera by using the D pad, which gives you the option to scope out your surroundings before making the decision to flip. The controls are pretty solid at this point, and the character designs are really cute. The dragoon boss that we encountered was this goofy but adorable dragon dressed in a suit of armor. From our brief glimpse of the five levels, there seems to be a lot of detail and work put into the environments to give the game diversity. We are looking forward to seeing more of Flip's Twisted World, and we'll update with additional information as soon as it becomes available. The game is set to be released in January 2010.