Flipping Death (Switch)

The point-and-click adventure genre seems to be the most fertile soil for comedy games. Perhaps it’s the need to create increasingly clever inventory puzzles that pushes the game to emphasize wacky characters and situations, or maybe just the focus on interacting with a wide cast that need to have distinct roles, or it could just be some of the early successes in the genre used the style and set the expected tone. Whatever the reason, lighthearted silliness is a fun part of these experience, but Flipping Death technically isn’t one of them. The player will not point and click at all during this particular adventure, but this puzzle platformer certainly seems cut from the same cloth with its over-the-top characters, unusual puzzle solutions, and ridiculous tone.

 

The story begins with Penny getting fired from her job, the girl’s taste for the macabre inspiring her to bring the spookiness of Halloween to a funeral home. She won’t let a lost job ruin her mood though, and she remains optimistic as she heads home… and dies in a graveyard. She might have chosen the best day to die though, because as her spirit wanders around the underworld in her Halloween costume, the grim reaper mistakes her for a temp worker, Death taking a holiday and leaving Penny in charge of life and death. She takes to the job surprisingly well, helping lost souls wrap up their unfinished business, but she soon learns that her body is walking around in the waking world, piloted by some other specter who is using it for its own ends. Reinvigorated to try and find her way back to life and get her body back, Penny must use her new powers as substitute reaper to interact with both the spirit world and living world.

The main thing that keeps Flipping Death interesting is the utterly unhinged world it takes place in. Its characters are all caricatures who lean extremely hard into their identifying traits. A guy who is into ice cream isn’t just a fan of it, he’s obsessed with it and will rant about his knowledge of its many flavors any chance he gets. The rich man who marries old women for their money is transparently evil and selfish. The cast is completely frank about who they are and what motivates them, the clash of such exaggerated individuals leading to some of the game’s highlights, especially with the somewhat grounded and more emotionally varied Penny trying to get them to do what she needs of them. These over-the-top characters also effectively communicate their roles well by being so heavily engrossed in their subjects of interest. If you need to find a bowling ball for a puzzle, don’t worry, the doctor who is obsessed with bowling won’t hide his interest. Despite the emotional transparency of the cast though, the game can still find clever uses for characters. You may need water to put out a fire, but by getting to know the civilians of the city you will find the priest can wave around his holy water, the unconventional solutions meaning that not every detail of a person is thrust in your face as a possible puzzle solution. In fact, it is possible to meet a character well before their usefulness emerges, but when the problem does crop up, an attentive player can intuit exactly which person can help the player out.

 

However, the grim reaper can’t just approach people and ask them to lend a hand. Penny is locked to the spirit world, itself being a land filled with kooky individuals who can play their own roles in solving problems. Much of their unfinished business will directly tie to whatever the story’s main puzzle is at the moment, their personal histories giving you more clues to things hidden in the land of the living. Certain objects even exist in the land of the dead as monsters who you will need to cajole to the right area to impact their real world counterparts, something as big as a windmill much easier to move by leading it on a dangerous chase in its spirit world monster form. While the platforming does play a role in these moments and in traversing the two sides of the city, it’s never so difficult that it’s limiting, the world layout more about preventing you from getting to areas with certain abilities than serving as a challenge on its own. Penny’s abilities aren’t the ones being limited though. Rather, it’s the living citizens of the small town who must be restricted, for each of them packs a unique skill that plays into the problem-solving challenges. Penny can possess humans and other creatures, able to read their thoughts to learn more about them and trying to pass herself off as their conscience giving them guidance. Since this rarely works though, she can be a bit more forceful, piloting their bodies around to get them to perform their character-specific action in the real world so she can have more tangible assets on her quest to reclaim her body.

Already, snappy writing and silly character concepts ensure Flipping Death would be a funny game regardless of what the gameplay was like, but by putting possession in the mix, things begin to get even wilder. One-note characters perfect for punchlines get more fun as you take the reins and put them to use, characters like the supervillain whose diabolical plan is to poke people put to use both as a fun way of messing with other characters and as a puzzle-solving tool. While characters let out baffled exclamations at their bodies moving on their own, you can move them around to solve some pretty clever puzzles, the game motivating the player to continue by promising more absurdity in the pipeline. While at first things do seem a bit limited to the town’s population, there are new characters introduced along the way as well as a few flashbacks to the far past where plenty of jokes are made about old-timey attitudes and the fact that you are a visitor from the future playing through a past you don’t actually know. Perhaps the best way the game keeps things creative in its later half is revealing unexpected new layers to its simple cast members. Yes, the bumbling cop is just as incompetent at his job as he seems… but at night, he becomes an elite sleepwalking hacker who beams ones and zeroes from a wrist-mounted keyboard! The psychiatrist seems to have a pretty clear role of helping people out, but it’s his singing sock puppet who can “cure any mental illness” that really does the work. With a whale, aliens, robot elvis, and even a zombie llama adding to the insanity, Flipping Death continues to dole out new weirdness as its unusual tale of death and possession moves along, but at the same time, the game is spaced out well enough that each new dose of wackiness can be appreciated on its own.

 

For a player not just interested in moving through the story, there are a few side activities for each act of the story you can tackle. Many characters who might not be story important instead of have little quests you can complete to unlock trading cards that give profiles of the cast members, the game happy to have yet another avenue to tell jokes through. None of these side quests are too substantial but are still good for a laugh, but there is a small way the gameplay does let down the story. Moving around the sidescrolling world of Flipping Death isn’t the hardest, but all the characters have a sort of noodly movement to them that does not blend well with a few tasks you need to complete. One point in the game you need to get some wood to a fire, but no character can simply lift the logs. Instead, you need to press your gangly host into the wood to push it along the ground, the physics making it harder than it should be. Most abilities tend to overcompensate to make up for this, such as a girl’s biting ability reaching farther than her mouth, but when physics objects need to be manipulated, they aren’t as cooperative. Flipping Death can also be a little too clever at times, the amount of potential options you need to consider at parts meaning you might overlook the vital one. The game thankfully has a picture hint system in the pause menu to help nudge along some of the harder puzzles. Possessing characters also requires you to collect certain small tokens in the underworld, but like the platforming, it really doesn’t impact the game in an appreciable way. The comparison to point and clicks earlier is perhaps best referenced here, as pointing and clicking was a means to an end to interacting with the world and its characters rather than something engaging on its own. Flipping Death just chose to use platforming to facilitate its story-telling, so it’s not really something that fails to be compelling so much as a system that does what it needs to here without hurting the humor and characters that the game truly wishes to focus on.

THE VERDICT: Life and death become delightfully wacky in Flipping Death, with a world just as unhinged for the living as it is for the dead creating plenty of hilarious moments across both sides of the cast. The exaggerated personalities and absurd situations would make for a fun story on its own, but through Penny’s power to possess the living, their absurdities find practical purpose in solving puzzles that fit their silly concepts. The humor ensures a constantly lively game full of fun quips and situations to keep the player going, so even though the platforming and physics aren’t hot on their own, they feed into plot and puzzles well enough that the player can enjoy Flipping Death’s writing and puzzle design with only minor impediment.

 

And so, I give Flipping Death for the Switch…

A GREAT rating. To really share what makes Flipping Death a great game would require recounting the many ridiculous scenarios that make up its plotline, and at that point this would be more of a walkthrough then an evaluation of the game’s quality. The game remains light-hearted despite the macabre subject matter, with even character deaths fitting the wacky tone when you can talk to the guy’s soul a second later. Nothing is ever too serious, every character being fodder for the joke-telling rather than anything that could darken the tone of the tale. Unhinged is the word I keep coming back to in describing the game, the character designs a goofy kind of grotesque, their personalities insane exaggerations, and the problems Penny needs to solve involving some out of the box thinking that matches the out of the box world it takes place in. The possession system is a fun way of interacting with the environment, but the platforming really doesn’t add much, meaning it mostly just serves as roadblocks or at its worst has physics issues like the wood-moving woes. The little hiccups in game design can’t hold back the story for long though, meaning that Flipping Death is mostly a game about having a good time laughing at the ridiculous world Zoink created for its supernatural adventure.

 

Flipping Death is a game meant to keep you laughing, and there’s plenty of characters and situations along the story’s path to at least wrap the player up in the delightfully odd tone for this tale of life and death. While the gameplay is a necessity to carry things forward, the silly script and absurd concepts on display make the fiddliness of some of its systems easy to ignore in favor of just basking in the creativity of Flipping Death’s comedy and puzzles.