Shifting World (3DS)
The black and white visuals of Shifting World do serve a vital gameplay function, but they also box in how they can be realized. In this puzzle platformer you must alternate between black and white platforms, and while these two colors are the best picks for contrast so you can tell which platforms will be available between shifts, the world you’re in also struggles to have a visual identity and maze-like level design makes it hard to keep your bearings.
Story-wise this is a deliberate issue. The game’s main character is invited by the Duke of Shadows to his mansion before instead being plunged into a dimension the Duke designed seemingly specifically for the purposes of tormenting his guests. Believing it impossible to navigate, the Duke takes great pleasure in the failures of those who enter this dimension, but there isn’t much of an explanation as to how this dimension came to be and besides one simple twist the story mostly just involves the action being interrupted so the Duke can say you won’t solve the current puzzle or be upset that you are succeeding. The funny thing about this set-up is the moment you’re thrown into the dimension you’ll notice levels filled with plenty of helpful arrows to guide you where you need to go, and while there is a character introduced later who could be responsible for some of them, it also becomes clear this is just part of the decor so hearing the Duke marvel at your success when you are just following directions hurts this simple story premise a touch.
Shifting World’s action mostly hinges on the core mechanic of swapping between black and white platforms. The entire level is comprised of either black spaces or white spaces, and when you press a button you’ll swap between them. This will manifest as things like a large square of white turning into open air or a set of openings in an otherwise solid wall turning into floating platforms once you swap the world’s colors. To make this work functionally there is another aspect to this swap, your character sinking into the ground and popping up on the other side so the colors can be properly inverted. This does mean on top of turning the background solid and the former platforms into the background, you also are now in an upside-down version of the level. This isn’t all that disorienting once you become familiar with it and it becomes easy to identify simple interactions like getting around a wall by just popping into the other dimension quickly, but one reason this won’t be too hard to acclimate to is the game seems incredibly afraid you won’t understand it and holds your hand to a surprising degree.
The earlier mentioned arrows drawn on the environment are persistent throughout the entire game and usually point to where you need to be heading or where you need to perform your shift, and not until around the fourth world of seven does the game begin to really dial them back. With the worlds having around 10 levels each that means a good deal of the experience will be guided a bit too heavily by these arrows giving away the answers, although in the later levels where they become less common they can instead become outright hostile as they’ll guide you into throwing yourself into instant death spikes that you couldn’t see off-screen. This trick is rare enough that you still can mostly trust the arrows and likely will, because the funny thing is these arrows, despite showing a lack of faith in the player’s ability to navigate, are actually quite a good fit for the labyrinthine stages you’re exploring.
Because everything is black and white and comprised mostly of rectangular platforms, areas can sometimes struggle to have a visual identity and it would be easy to get lost without something like some arrows to orient you. Some levels can have a more distinct overall visual identity like one comprised of many small floating cubes that are essentially rooms you enter standing out amidst the many stages that are just block mazes, but when you’re not just following the arrow tour there are times where it will become disorienting with how often you need to shift in a bland looking space to navigate it. When portals are added that let you hop through a hole to shift the world instead this can start to get even more confusing as it removes the vertical flip from the color shifting process, but it is at least a wise complication in terms of giving you a new tool for how you alter the world during navigation.
Shifting World does make a weak attempt to help you orient yourself with a map on the bottom screen, but levels are sometimes enormous and the map struggles to accurately portray them. Not only will this map need to flip every time you flip, but eventually it becomes so zoomed out it’s hard to tell certain things apart. Certain objects are given a checkered pattern to indicate they don’t disappear in either version of the world and on the map these can sometimes look like the lethal spikes that will force a full level restart if touched. In later levels a new mechanic is added where objects that were always part of the background like decorative black cubes will now become part of the stage if you grab a briefcase. Briefcases flatten the usually 3D world and thus add or eliminate certain platforms based on these background blocks which now the map needs to show the state of as well, leading to more visual noise that can be tough to parse. Using the map does become essential unfortunately as levels start to embrace the idea of otherwise blind drops that may be required or deadly with no clear indicator in advance besides the map, but then this is further worsened by the fact that important items on the map are made far too large. A key or briefcase will be given a large icon that covers up some of the nearby area, but the worst case of obfuscation comes from the indicator for your own character, meaning that you won’t be able to see the nearby area because your own icon is placed over it. The window of action on the top screen is unfortunately lacking in showing anything but the most immediate jumps, so with the increase in level complexity also comes more irritation in trying to utilize this awful map system.
Perhaps far too late in the game the briefcase powers turn into ones you can activate yourself, the ability to flatten the world on demand blending well with your shifting for a mechanic that actually demands a good degree of thought. Navigation before then, even when the arrows start to become a little less common, still often involved heading forward as far as you could go before shifting or possibly hopping through a portal or two, but by the time you really have the personal tools to make for more advanced navigation you’re in the most difficult levels so you have to learn how to utilize them on your own. There are a few more mechanics scattered throughout the experience that eventually open things up to less linear play, keys at first being a way of opening up areas but soon shifting on numbered spaces removes barriers and touching floating arrows will spin the world’s orientation to make platforming a bit more layered at the cost of further issues trying to utilize your map. Sometimes you might not even know where a key has opened a path though, especially in levels with multiple keys to grab, and while a new arrow indicator can show you the general direction of a removed key block, it also disappears when you’re in the general area so you might not even realize what you’ve done after being guided back to the fruits of your labors. Some of these ideas could work in a better designed game though, but funnily enough the area the game fails perhaps the most is in one of its most basic mechanics: jumping.
Shifting World’s jump does not want you to press the control stick and jump button at the same time. Doing so will lead to your character not jumping at all, instead simply running ahead while making no attempt to leap. You can jump first and then press the direction but it won’t go as far as required every time, and while you can instead try to move first and then jump, you might not always have good clearance for this. Thankfully early levels are small and safe, drops leading to just a little time going backwards to attempt the jump again but that doesn’t make it any nicer to experience this oddly unresponsive approach to a fundamental element of platform game design. Where this gets worse though are when the safety nets are removed and instead punishment waits at the bottom of pits. Spikes are instant kills and require you to restart the stage, and in a puzzle platformer like this that mostly means you just go through and do things you already solved (or just follow the arrows again in the weaker designed levels) to get back to where you were. There is no challenge in repeating these since there are no moving platforms and only on a few rare cases does anything really require good timing to pull off, so you just get back to where the spikes killed you and try again. Besides the issues with spike traps caused by the map, there are moment where you will have barely any clearance for getting a run going before you jump, including a room where there is literally only space for you to stand on either side of the spike and it can kill you if you touch it from the sides. You essentially need to perfectly time the control stick press and jump in short succession or you’ll die and need to repeat level portions that hold no interest after you solved them, this jumping issue taking a game that just had some poor ideas on how to execute its world shifting concept and making it into a sometimes excruciating experience.
Beyond the story there are time attack versions of every stage where you need to complete them quickly and perhaps unsurprisingly, the early half of the game with abundant arrows trivializes many of these while later levels become thankless challenges to attempt because of the rough jumping and confounding map. To add a little more roughness to the game as well, there are sometimes visual delays such as right after grabbing keys that can lead to your character moving without it being represented on screen. Most of the time the game won’t place these poorly, but there are moments like an area where you’re leaping through portals and need to weave around spikes where it is quite likely you might drop to your death after grabbing the key since you can’t see your character to guide him to safety. In a game that sometimes struggles during standard play, it’s hard to find the motivation to try and complete the levels all over again but with stricter conditions and the threat of an instant death if you’re not fast enough to earn a rating in time attack.
THE VERDICT: Flipping the colors and flipping the world is an idea with promise, but it’s hard to find or appreciate them in Shifting World thanks to the mess they’re surrounded by. When things begin the arrows are too accommodating and invalidate what little challenge there could be in the early straightforward stages but when the game starts to hold your hand less you are instead left with a messy map, rough jump, and pointless spike deaths to make progressing unfortunately irritating. It takes a surprisingly long time for Shifting World to start to really whip up challenging levels and even then it hosts them poorly due to its fundamental issues, this black and white world perhaps just as agonizing as the Duke of Shadows desired.
And so, I give Shifting World for Nintendo 3DS…
A TERRIBLE rating. Kicking off by being boring thanks to the arrows giving everything away before giving way to frustration as even levels with potential are undermined because the map and jump issues start to become outright damaging rather than annoying, Shifting World is mostly at its best when you’re on the guided tour but the stages themselves blend together into black and white mundanity. Shifting World can cook up a few levels with more visual identity based on things like spacing objects into distinct formations or getting creative with the world rotating arrows, but a lot of that effort is wasted when a spike death you’d struggle to see coming makes you loathe retreading any bit of terrain because once something is figured out, it only takes time to overcome it again. Shifting World’s black and white aesthetic does it no favors here, because while it does make it clear what will become open air and what will be solid ground after a shift, it also makes so much of the world feel identical and lacking in any important visual indicators. In the massive stages where you need to cover ground over and over again thanks to keys and number barriers you’re left trying to follow a map that will be rotating around just like you and has visual noise thanks to the world flattening feature necessitating even unnecessary background cubes show up on the map. If the game was more willing to add things like designs, textures, or even smatterings of color for shifting up which two are contrasted then perhaps navigation would be less confusing, but instead its stopgap solution are the arrows that often give too much away when they’re not just a cruel trick.
Shifting World pretty much does its main world flipping concept right and everything surrounding it wrong. The perspective is too limited to navigate well and the map can’t aid with it as much as it is expected to, the simple act of jumping is flawed, and the level designs, even when they can integrate the mechanics well, are saddled with the all too helpful arrows to prevent them from being too difficult to navigate thanks to bland visual design. Shifting World is a continuation of the Shift series that began with single screen Flash and mobile games that were much simpler, so it seems trying to expand outward ended up causing everything to crumble. Some ideas can’t just be increased in size without adjustment, and the few steps taken here to account for the enormous labyrinths weren’t nearly enough to let this gameplay type thrive in this rough attempt to evolve the franchise’s interesting world flipping concept.