The Premise
Penny is a over-the-top goth wannabee that gets a little too zealous about Halloween and is fired from her funeral home job. She then goes to hang out with her boyfriend in a cemetery before falling through a crypt, bashing her body on a rock, and dies – thereby meeting Death himself. Badly in need of a vacation, Death mistakes Penny for his replacement and she becomes the harbinger of doom, helping dead folks get settled into their newfound lives.
I dunno about you but this all seems pretty normal to me.
How It Works
Zoink Games has gone all out with Flipping Death, a 2.5D platforming adventure in which you play as Penny, going back and forth between the worlds of the living and the dead by inhabiting those still breathing and performing tasks. These tasks are an effort to let the dead be at rest, and do their bidding through Penny.
Penny accomplishes tasks by a series of zany puzzles such as licking a boat to paint it, dislodging skeletons stuck in a whale’s blowhole, and inhabiting a poking fanatic in order to… poke stuff.
Art & Music
The art can be described as comedic and straight out of a nightmare. Some might more closely associate this art style with the descriptor of Tim Burton meets 1990s Nickelodeon. Whatever helps you best grip your brain around it, the set pieces and elongated character features will have you wishing for more the minute you are done.
The developers could not have picked a better soundtrack if they had tried. The serious yet playful tunes feel perfectly at home and the sound effects are tremendously on point. Even the voice acting is incredibly varied and distinct for each character.
Gameplay
In order to posses characters in the world of the living, you’ll need to collect ghostly creatures trying to escape you to use as a sort of currency system to inhabit the bodies of the living. These creatures come in a variety of types that serve as a hierarchy of the currency. Certain characters can only be unlocked with special ghosts, and even then characters have a varying amount of ghosts you need to acquire. Even though capturing the creatures can be challenging at times, it seems there is almost never a shortage of what you need even in the later levels.
When you inhabit the living characters, the screen flips horizontally and you enter the world of the living in your new but temporary body. The characters aren’t really sure what’s happening, but they can definitely tell something isn’t right.
Movement
Movement feels clunky at points… but let me explain. There’s a dynamic at play that you’re controlling a body that is not your own. It seems logical that there would be a slight delay between the moment you press the control to walk left and when your character actually does so. But it’s a bit more than serious than that. Even in Penny’s body, your own body, the movement is delayed and imprecise. In some of the more precision platforming pieces of the title, this can be obnoxious. Jumping and using your scythe as a method of travel can also be clunky and irritating at times, though it’s a welcome change from the same old same we keep seeing in indie games. Fast travel by way of the map works perfectly.
Characters
Every character in Flipping Death is different and equally stranger than the one before. The personalities at play are stellar and distinct, and are only added to by the unique movement abilities they each have. You won’t be able to accomplish any of your objectives with just one living character – it will take a variety of them performing different tasks to ensure you complete your goals.
Objectives
The goals in Flipping Death are stated, but not obvious. At times, it’s incredibly difficult to figure out what your objective actually is. Further, once you do, it’s next to impossible to know exactly how to accomplish that goal. There’s a fair bit of exploration, experimentation, and guessing needed to uncover your next move. The puzzles are hard and they’re supposed to be – but most mysteries have some clues. Flipping Death seems to thrive on the fact that you’ll be lost for a large part of the game.
Humor
I’d be doing you a huge disservice if I failed to mention the large role that humor plays in Flipping Death. Each bit of dialogue is designed to make you chuckle, if not laugh. Full of puns, quirky personalities, and even some downright intentionally stupid jokes play out perfectly for the genre and the setting.
Recommendation
If you’re like me, this game probably isn’t for you. I love platformers and I even love puzzle platformers – but I don’t like being confused about what I’m supposed to be doing. The puzzles can be obtuse and just plain not fun to figure out. There’s a hint system, but I really wanted the game to give me what I needed without feeling like I was cheating in order to progress. The platforming and movement could be improved, but were still high points in the gameplay. The art, music, characters, humor, and everything else about the game that were non-gameplay related were a wild and fun ride. I’d recommend Flipping Death if you’re okay with not having much direction at all and taking quite a little bit of time to figure things out rather than a challenging but still fast-paced game.
*Flipping Death was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
