Picking Up Steam: And Yet It Moves (PC)

To kick off the second year of gradually clearing out my massive Steam backlog, I wanted to do something similar to what I did with Atom Zombie Smasher last year in picking one of the first games I ever bought on the platform. The side-scrolling platformer And Yet It Moves has a good deal in common with Atom Zombie Smasher when it comes to my relationship with it. Not only was it also acquired in the Humble Indie Bundle #3, but I had also played And Yet It Moves for less than an hour before shelving it for years. Once more Picking Up Steam means I’ll be giving a second chance to an indie game I had stopped playing for some reason long ago, although considering I apparently had been playing it on Christmas Eve of 2011, perhaps it was just a case of the exciting distractions that came after that lead me to putting the game down.

 

And Yet It Moves does little to introduce itself, the player’s character being an unnamed male made of paper. The world he finds himself in is similar in composition at times, looking almost like photos that have been cut up to make the background, dangers, or even other living creatures you contend with as you press forward looking for a level’s end. The game’s name is a likely allusion to a phrase associated with Galileo, the term “and yet it moves” referring to the idea that no matter what people may claim about the way the planets move, the Earth will continue to revolve around the sun as it always has. This strange paper world you find yourself in here though is actually the opposite, because while it can rotate, the world’s ability to do so is entirely in your hands.

When it comes to standard platforming, our hero only has the most basic of jumps, although it is a bit of an ungainly one that feels like it comes a touch short in terms of your control over midair movement. However, a much more important tool for traversal will be your ability to rotate the world ninety degrees with a button press, with another button devoted to a quick 180 degree twist. Time will freeze for a bit as everything but your character spins so you can rapidly press the button if you want more than a single turn or want to quickly undo an accidental rotation without any consequences. Rotation will be what you use to overcome most challenges, the game starting it off fairly simple with you needing to walk across walls and ceilings, and while a big fall or a tumble into the black abyss beyond the torn edges of the background will kill you, checkpoints are incredibly abundant. In fact, they feel like they’re placed fairly often because of the sometimes fiddly nature of positioning yourself while in midair. If you accidentally fall too far or barely miss the edge of the platform, you don’t normally lose much progress, and this definitely helps with adjusting your mindset because it can be quite easy to mix up whether to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise when under pressure.

 

The platforming in And Yet It Moves is not really its strong suit and you’ll probably lose a good deal of lives to misjudging if a drop is safe since too far a drop is deadly. Getting a little lost isn’t uncommon either since the only clue on which direction to go at times will be the checkpoint pointing in the general direction to travel in some very voluminous levels. However, before you’ve left the starting caves to head into the forest, you’ll see the game start to get a bit creative with how rotating the world can influence things beyond just your characters. Bats want to hang on the ceiling, so some moments see you guiding them through the cave by changing which way up is. Fire similarly burns upward, so if you rotate the level, a burning surface can be made to ignite other areas. The game does start to feel a bit more like a puzzle platformer at times, and while some like basically rolling an object out of a little maze aren’t too captivating, others like trying to avoid being crushed by the very boulders you need to use as mobile platforms to stand on add some more thoughtfulness to your traversal.

And Yet It Moves can be rather tough at points though. For example, a horned hamster creature at one point needs to be coaxed into ramming through barriers, and if it doesn’t build up enough speed, you have to rotate things around and try and trick it again, the creature not always doing the best following you around for this trick to work smoothly. At other times, the game runs into a curious issue with its checkpointing system. When you die, the world will rotate back to the checkpoint’s orientation, but objects are not reset. This can aid you at times if you can dive back into a puzzle, but other moments it will throw things off. Swings shows up from time to time, and if you do a swing right on your first attempt, you can just move along unbothered. Mess up once and the swing can get jammed into a tough spot and you’ll be rotating things around trying to break it free. Good ideas in And Yet It Moves often have some sort of tiny issue attached that ensures progress is rarely smooth.

 

There are extras in And Yet It Moves but never in the form of in-level collectibles. Instead, beyond achievement hunting, there are a few bonus “Epilog” levels after the story as well as speedrun challenges, Time Trials, and a Limited Rotations mode that aim to test your level knowledge. Survival feels like it could run up against the game’s sometimes imprecise mechanics though, its addition not as interesting when presumably you can’t clear the others already if you’re dying repeatedly. You’ll need quite the understanding of level layouts to have a hope of making a mark on these extra modes, but the main story is at least consistently inventive so it doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily lacking. In fact, while And Yet It Moves’s bonus levels do go a bit far in terms of demanding gimmicks that would certainly be rough to tackle in the main adventure, setting them aside as extras ensures they don’t aggravate players with their more outlandish and difficult concepts.

THE VERDICT: And Yet It Moves gradually finds its footing with the rotation mechanic in the same way the player does. Right as the novelty of walking on walls and ceilings wears out, new objects and entities start to interact with your world spinning antics, giving you more puzzles to figure out and trickier platforming to pull off. At times though, the game’s rough nature gets in the way of your enjoyment, your standard jumping already a bit weak but some gimmicks can be a bit unruly to wrangle if you don’t do them perfectly on your first attempt. The game gets more creative the deeper you get into it, but it’s certainly held back by how often your failures arise from little issues in how the game handles the way you and other objects move.

 

And so, I give And Yet It Moves for PC…

An OKAY rating. I remember when this game was released on WiiWare and it was lauded as an excellent example of what the service had to offer. Looking at it now, it feels more like that mindset came from an era where small indies were still able to impress by just putting together decent packages with strong core ideas. It hardly deserves a strong recommendation due to its rough edges, the game frequently asking you to accept you slipped off an edge of a seemingly safe surface or you’ll need to rotate the world a bunch to free an object that got lodged in a bad spot. Its creative ideas can still come through, the game escalating things well as you’re finding out new ways the rotating world can be interacted with, but the checkpoint system really is patching up an obvious flaw in the game’s design. Its sketchy appearance unfortunately comes with many oddly shaped platforms and objects with unclear physics, a monkey sliding across the ground the same way a broken tree branch does while rocks are almost bouncy at times. You often die on your path to understand the world and popping back to life so quickly to try again keeps the game moving along, but tidying up the world would have made things feel better since you wouldn’t have to see your paper man fall to pieces over and over again while just trying to get a swing into position.

 

And Yet It Moves does show the creativity and commitment to one strong core mechanic that would come to define the indie revolution of the early 2010s, but it also didn’t really have the strength to be a lasting representation of the potential of independent developers because, for all its interesting ideas, it had some slippery fundamentals. Its ideas are more often nifty than solid and you push through a bit of jank to clear the challenges it puts before you, but I think it was more than Christmas that lead to me dropping the game back in 2011. While later gimmicks that require more thought and puzzle solving over precision do make the overall adventure a somewhat enjoyable one, you have to put up with a fair bit of awkwardness to see the ideas worth seeing.