And Yet It Moves has its heart in the right place, but doesn't quite reach fulfill the potential of its concept.
Cons: Feels kind of repetitive; Frustrating at times; A little hard to gauge fall damage
Gravity seems to be all the rage with game developers these days. Whether you're playing the planet running action of Super Mario Galaxy, the devious gravity swapping of VVVVVV, or even a small gravity segment of Limbo, developers have gotten a lot out of such simple mechanics. I would love to add And Yet It Moves to the category of brilliant gravity games, but a few small issues hold it back.
In And Yet It Moves, you can flip gravity at any time to point in any of the four cardinal directions. Unlike many of the game's contemporaries, you can do this mid-air, but you will continue to accelerate, and fall damage is applied liberally. In fact, that's an issue right there: the fall damage is tough to read. Generally you can go by the rule, "if it's not on the screen, you will take fall damage reaching it," but every now and then it seems like you survive a longer fall or get killed on a shorter plummet. A little clarity would go a long way.
But anyway, using gravity is less about manipulating your trajectory than it is about manipulating the world around you. You'll drop rocks, rotate platforms, cause flames to rise, and more over the course of the 3 or so hour game. And Yet It Moves finds a good balance of adding interesting new twists on the gravity mechanic, while still keeping its core very simple, as you proceed. Each new mechanic is pretty fun to use, once you get over the frustrating initial learning process where you repeatedly die from fall damage.
Somehow, though, this doesn't prevent the game from feeling repetitive. Perhaps because the mechanics are all fairly simple they seem to have a short lifespan. Something in the way? Tilt gravity and use a rock. Something else in the way? Tilt gravity in a different direction to use a flame; or a rotating platform; or a hamster. For all the fun of discovering each mechanic for the first time, it seems that each one has precisely one purpose: a square peg in a square hole. For that reason, many of the mechanics seem to just barely overstay their welcome, despite the relative brevity of the game.
Still, I'd be remiss if I said I didn't have fun anyway. Tilting gravity is fun, as always, and the art style makes everything very interesting and bizarre to look at. In an isolated bubble, And Yet It Moves is a decent way to kill a few hours that is neither really good nor really bad. But in the vast world of today's gaming, it lacks the true spark to really stand out.