One of my favorite E3 2015 indie games came with an unusual surprise: it’s available now! Gravity Ghost, by Ivy Games, is a cerebral gravity-based game that’s equal parts storybook fantasy and sci-fi physics.
“It’s a physics game with a twist,” said Gravity Ghost developer Erin Robinson-Swink. “You’re sailing on gravitational fields, collecting stars, trying to put the universe together after it was destroyed by a black hole.”
By you she means Iona, the spirit of a young girl who is your avatar amidst the chaos of the cosmos. The art style is fantastic, evoking a subtle, chill vibe that makes Gravity Ghost a relaxing experience. The soundtrack, composed by Ben Prunty of FTL fame, adds to the melt-into-your-chair experience.
Controlling Iona is a breeze, and the relationship between gravity and mass is a big part of how you move through each level. Getting the feel isn’t easy. It rests on a gaming sweet spot between too simple and too complex.
“It took us more than a year of tuning her movement to make it feel like something that was rewarding and intuitive,” Robinson-Swink said.
Gravity Ghost didn’t start out as a sci-fi vision quest. The original concept was a more traditional spaceship game, but Robinson-Swink explained that the more she played with it the less excitement she had.
“It started out as a game about spaceships and I was trying to code something along the line of an Asteroids clone and I just got bored with that,” she said. “So I said ‘what if it was a character jumping around planets instead of a ship?’”
Iona feels very fleshed out and alive. She’s not just some static stick man flopping around but has a style and an energy that seem uniquely her own. The game looks like something ripped from a child’s imagination.
“My background is in newspaper comics so I wanted to have this very cartoony style,” Robinson-Swink said. “I don’t know how to draw things for real so I just kind of went with it.”
Gravity Ghost is out now for PC, Mac and Linux, a rarity among games being demoed in the Indiecade section of E3. You can find it in the Steam Store, and it will be “coming to PS4 at some point.”
For Robinson-Swink, Gravity Ghost represents a chance for her to connect with people who might not normally imagine themselves sitting down to game for hours on end. Ivy Games bundles an extra code with the game in the hopes that players share the experience with friends who don’t define themselves as gamers.
“I wanted this game to reach people who don’t normally play video games. There’s a lot of people who are unconvinced. They’ve played a game or two and think ‘oh that’s not for me,’” she said. “And I just want them to play something where there’s no way to fail, there’s no dying, but it’s still really tricky. Gravity’s a tricky thing, but it’s forgiving.”
