Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Plana Gravatatis’ and ‘ACIDTRIP’
Welcome to 2023, hope it’s comfy.
Hello again! Hope your holidays were fun. It’s time, however, for us to begin once again.
Plana Gravatatis is a 2D/3D platformer created by ‘cyvet’, a solo indie dev. Originally created for Ludum Dare 41 under the theme of ‘two incompatible genres’, players will try to collect coins and locks in both a 2D and 3D space. Somehow. Did I mention that it’s also randomly generated?
The game itself starts out small and simple to give players a better idea of what they are getting in to. They can jump twice to reach great heights, and wander around these strange gear/hexagon planets to find the lock on each ‘level’.
To help, there is a neon-blue line tethered to the lock, guiding players towards their goal. Grabbing it will reload the world, adding another planet-hexagon and placing the lock in a new location.
Where things get tricky is how the player can only maneuver in a 2D space, but the world itself is 3D: enter rotations.
See, each planet is actually two of these 2D gears slotted together, as seen above. When at an intersection of both parts, players can ‘rotate’ the planet to shift their entire perspective on the world, allowing them to maneuver on a different set of axis then they had before.
At first this is more of a novelty, but since every lock adds a planet-gear things get out of hand real quick as the game scales outwards. The only assistant tool is a neon line to help find the lock; it is up to the player to uncover just how they will navigate the sea of rotations in order to find it.
Playing like a strange survival game as each lock adds to the timer, Plana Gravatatis may have your head spinning the farther you get in to the game. It can be brutal to understand directions at first, especially as the lines begin to clog up the screen and the timer keeps ticking away. However, the idea of constantly moving through different spaces is intriguing, and the execution is there to create a strangely satisfying environment. Just watch out for the camera some times, as the planets might make it go a tad wonky if they get in the way.
Achieve your highest score, and then do it again, and again, and again. If you like the idea of platforming but always wanted it to be more like Super Mario Galaxy, this might be a fun side idea.
ACIDTRIP is a… well, an acid trip. Created by jrush64, it is a stationary shooting game focused on the idea of two colours and tripping through various effects and power ups.
In this game there are two states that the centre ‘gunner’ can be in; blue or yellow. Circling the centre piece are two coloured blocks, and these are what the gameplay centres around as the goal is to shoot the corresponding block colour.
The gunner will change colours at random, so players will have to alternate their focus between shooting the blue on blue, and yellow on yellow, no matter what happens. There are some power ups that can appear as well, but these are not what make the game interesting. No, it’s the line ‘no matter what happens’.
This game is a visual clustertruck, to put it simply, as every so often the game will ‘trip’ out and a new effect is added to the game’s visual state that messes with the visual senses. This can mean new scanlines are added, new perspectives are distorted, and colours are tossed.
Things are made to completely throw off the player in that classic synthwave aesthetic, as everything is possible as long as it has a neon colour palette. It wants the player to miss the correct target, because that lets the blocks pick up their pace as they inch closer and closer to the centre. If they reach the centre, the game is over.
As said, ACIDTRIP lives up to its name almost immediately — everything begins to warp and distort without a care in the world to the point that you cannot even be sure if you are playing the same game you started with. Not everyone will be able to enjoy it due to this, but those that can will definitely enjoy the sheer nonsense that will follow.
If you love the aesthetic, then you’ll probably love the game.
