Heavenly Bodies - free-floating in the space age 70s.
QWOP
So far clumsy movement games have been replayable novelties, where clear physical tasks become frustratingly difficult, hilarious and rewarding.
You could be challenged to run down a track in QWOP and end up going backwards, make a sandwich using tentacles for hands in Octodad, or attempt a patient’s heart transplant in Surgeon Simulator, with results that often resemble the prelude to a mixed grill.
I’m sure all he was missing was a clock radio right there.
Ahh. Fun times.
So far, these games haven’t provided much in the way of a mental challenge – the goal is clear and the path straightforward while dexterity was the key to the game.
Well the team of Alexander Perrin and Josh Tatengelo of 2ptInteractive are set to challenge our thumbs and our minds with their current game in development, Heavenly Bodies.
https://heavenlybodiesgame.com/
You play cosmonauts on a 1970s space station riddled with disastrously unfortunate mishaps, like a breadstick stuck in the generator, or an outside dish that seems to have gone rogue.
In this era of the space age, the kinks in such feats of engineering hadn’t been sorted out quite yet, and certainly not automated, leaving all the fixing up to you, your problem-solving minds, and your clumsy, weightless body. Everything is manual, and the game is sometimes short on advice, leaving you with plenty of room to come up with clever solutions.
https://heavenlybodiesgame.com/
Being in a weightless environment with rag-doll physics at play, everything not nailed down is in constant movement, including you as you move your arms to grip handholds and your legs to kick against walls hopefully to gracefully glide your on your way, but more often find yourself achingly out of reach of anything to grasp, arms haplessly flailing your feeble arms around until you can Sandra Bullock your way to some kind of handhold.
Heavenly Bodies goes beyond mere movement difficulty, as with a second player on board the game offers a myriad of ways to add the depth of logic puzzles to the challenges – in which inventive way are we to reach that other compartment? In which order are you to coordinate the pulling of levers to open hatches and airlocks so that you don’t see your crew mate sucked out into the lonely empty void?
https://heavenlybodiesgame.com/
This is a game that does not take itself too seriously, which allows it to channel fear, frustration and fatality into a source of high mirth. Physical clumsiness in games is funny enough as it is, but this game adds the tension of claustrophobia of being stuck in a series of metal cages, and death from asphyxiation.
In a similar way to the humour found in Surgeon Simulator, the tension and morbidity of a dire situation of horrendous death by clumsy hands becomes twice as funny with the comedy of dark humour.
When still in development, Heavenly Bodies was the winner of the Rising Star Award at Gamescom Indie Arena 2019, and now with a year of development to go, Heavenly Bodies is a game to keep an eye out for its release in 2021.