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And Yet It Moves
PC (Steam)
Eppur Si Muove
2.5/5 stars
“And Yet It Moves” (“AYIM”) is one of the many 2D platformers that have caused that once-forgotten genre to experience an incredible resurgence thanks to the advent of Indie game development. In this case, the tiny group of people behind the game is a team of Austrian computer science students who originally created the prototype of “AYIM” as a school project at the Vienna University of Technology using the Torque Game Engine.
Presentation
“AYIM” is a very different-looking game aesthetically. While the game is entirely 2D, the objects in the game seem to be placed as layers within a 3D construction environment. Each of these flat planes is decorated with a photograph that looks like it was torn right out of a magazine, complete with ripped edges. The result is a game that looks like a living collage, with pictures of rocks serving as rocks, pictures of trees serving as trees, and pictures of animals serving as the game’s scant few enemies. The main character, however, is not a photograph, but a hand-drawn pencil doodle of a dude with crazy hair.
The sound in the game is just as avant-garde as the graphics, with all of the sound effects performed by a person beatboxing, significant usage of artistic silence, and a few brief segments where thumping techno music becomes an actual part of the gameplay.
Update: At some point between 2013 when I reviewed the game and 2016 at the time of this update, Broken Rules... broke... something. The game is incredibly unstable in Windows 10 and refuses to work properly even with Compatibility Mode enabled. This is one of the very, very few games that worked in Windows 7 and 8.x but don't work in Windows 10, thus it is getting a significant dock on its presentation score.
Story
Sometimes I’m willing to give platformers a pass on the story requirement, giving them a score of ‘N/A’ (not applicable) out of 5. “AYIM” isn’t lucky enough to get that treatment, as the game is completely without anything resembling a story, narrative, or even excuse for the on-screen happenings. The player is just dropped into the game world with no introduction to the character (I dubbed him ‘Doodle-Man’), what the overarching goal of the game is, or why Doodle-Man has the ability to rotate the entire world.
While the lack of story is distressing, according to the game’s development team, they wanted to focus more on making the gameplay solid than worry about writing a story. I can understand and respect this decision, especially because computer science students are traditionally known for their skills in math rather than literature, and the addition of a dedicated writer would have increased their staff from 4 people to 5.
On the other hand, the development team also mentioned that the game is meant to convey a journey from being confined to being free. This makes sense as an interpretation of some of Plato’s writings, especially his analogy of ‘the cave’ in which everything people claim to see and know are merely shadows of the truth. As the player moves through the three worlds of “AYIM,” Doodle-Man progresses from a cave to a jungle to a psychedelic abstraction. The game’s bonus stages move even further into freedom, taking place in a completely black and white world (either that, or the development team felt lazy and didn’t bother to add collage graphics to the bonus stages). Even the title of the game is a witty reference to a semi-historical quote from Galileo. Thus by having a good story idea, yet not being able to express it properly in the game itself, Broken Rules suffered a big miss in this category.
Gameplay
“AYIM” is an incredibly simple game to play, as there are only 5 commands, and each of them can be mapped to any key or button the player desires. Doodle-Man can move left or right, jump, and rotate the world 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise (the WiiWare version of the game has a much more complex rotation structure, allowing the player to rotate the world gradually using motion controls… which the PC version unfortunately doesn’t have). The PC version also suffers from a bit of clunkiness in the controls, such as the fact that Doodle-Man won’t start moving immediately if the player is holding a directional button when he respawns after dying, but instead the player must wait until Doodle-Man has finished respawning before pressing a directional button.
Doodle-Man must move from his starting location in each of the game’s 21 stages, passing by chalk outline drawings of himself that act as checkpoints, until finally reaching a piece of paper with a Doodle-Man-shaped hole in the middle that serves as the goal. While the base game consists of only 16 stages, the credits sequence is a fully interactive bonus stage, and clearing the credits unlocks an additional 4 incredibly-evil bonus stages that provide the player with a glimpse of some less-refined gameplay ideas that didn’t make it into the base game. Of course, Doodle-Man has infinite lives, so the main difficulty in the bonus stages is not ragequitting after dying 100 times at the same spot.
The stage rotation mechanic is the main gimmick in “AYIM,” and it works very well, providing numerous interesting platforming situations that feel new and fresh compared to the static environments of typical platformers. In order to prevent players from just rotating their way out of any difficulty, however, Doodle-Man has the same weakness Mario used to have in his “Donkey Kong” days – if he falls too far, he dies. Since Doodle-Man maintains his momentum when the world rotates, it’s very easy to accidentally get him moving so fast that he will explode at the slightest touch of any obstacle, requiring mastery of the gameplay mechanics and observation of the stage designs instead of simply brute-forcing through each stage.
Even with its solid levels of challenge and stage design, “AYIM” is a woefully short game. I completed it in two sittings, totaling about 5 hours. In order to pad the gameplay and give OCD gamers more ‘value,’ “AYIM” includes several replay modes for the game’s stages with arbitrary limitations such as time, a limited number of world rotations, etc. I never felt compelled to mess with any of these alternate modes, as speedrunning has never interested me, but I can see fans of ancient NES platformers who loved to set arbitrary limitations upon themselves in games as kids might enjoy the flash of nostalgia and appreciate the fact that enforcement of these rules is actually built into the game.
Overall
“And Yet It Moves” is utterly unique in both visuals and audio, features a compelling gameplay gimmick and solid stage design, is DRM free (oops!), and was built by a team of 4 people. Those are enough reasons right there to at least give it a try. The only things wrong with this game are the short length and perhaps the development team going a little overboard with abstraction.
Presentation: 4/5 (Updated: 2/5)
Story: 0.5/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5 (Updated: 2.5/5)
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