And Yet It Moves

I’d thought that once I cleared the horror woods of Alan Wake -> Amnesia that the next few would fall quick and easy, but progress remains slower than anticipated. Between increased work hours and summertime induced sadness I felt my enthusiasm for this project severely dip this week, amongst a peaking awareness of the ultimate futility of the exercise in terms of, well, feeling like I am a productive human being who achieves things - surely the feeling that drives us all, deep down, that I should be nurturing yada ya. To compound matters, A.Y.I.M. took a good while to get into, probably no thanks to the dryness of the colour pallete at the start and a fairly pitiful audio track (seriously who makes a puzzle platformer devoid of music?), not to mention that control-wise it’s a pretty jarring game to play, at first. The player navigates the puzzles/platforms both by moving the avatar is the traditions WASD way but also by rotating the screen at 90 degrees with the arrow keys, which necessitates the avatar freezing for a second while it does so, in turn severely interrupting the flow of the game. Look, it takes a lot of getting used to. It’s also one of those games where you’re going to die/reset a LOT without much punishment - generally a style that caters to me but in this instance the death sound-effect, literally a whispered “touch” or “torch” or something, really grated. Let’s just say it became a lot more playable after I started setting my own background music.

But then, yeah, it did get good eventually. The colours and concepts became livelier and the puzzles/platforming, more interesting. I genuinely enjoyed myself for the final third, and found myself thinking “Yes, this is a good use of time! This is why I’m doing this stupid project! I am enjoying myself just as much as if I was playing something new and expensive like Fallout 4! Haha!”

So would I recommend it? (Wait, have I been recommending any games so far? I guess I haven’t really. Maybe I could start now.) Recommendation: Give it a run if you love 2D puzzle-platformers (they’re my favourite, usually), otherwise probably give it a miss.

When/where/how/why July 2010, Steam store, for $5, for some reason.

Was this the first install? I’d installed it once and played it for seven minutes at some point between then and now. May this inconsequential information turn your life around.

Playthrough length/completion status: Three-ish hours, which is honestly two more than I thought I would ever spend on it given how I felt at the start. I completed the vanilla “Journey” mode but didn’t touch any of the bonus things like “survival” and “time-trial”. 7/30 achievements, ha.

Who And Yet It Moves was released in 2009, and it’s by Broken Rules, an Austria based developer. I didn’t immediately recognise any of their other titles but my interest has been piqued by Secrets of Raetikon, so maybe I’ll pick that up at some point and we can look to seeing the results when I get to S in approximately 5 years time.

Looking up the game on the google machine also reminded me that the title is based on a Galileo quote.

next on the list is Anodyne