I played The Flip Side a while back on the flip side of me playing Dragon's Dogma. So.. about 2,687 years ago? Anyway, it's been a while, but I find that doesn't matter because this level is still freshly ingrained in my long-term memory. And it won't leave. The Flip Side is an exercise in Point of View alteration where the action takes place upside down. From your inverted perspective up becomes down, left becomes right, and hard becomes merciless. And I'm not kidding there.
It's hard for me to offer my opinion to the public at large because from what I gather, it's divided roughly between people who simply want to enjoy calming, easy experiences, and those who want extreme challenges. I've never shirked my contempt, for example, for platformers requiring any sort of ceiling-grab sections. Swinging I express no qualms since it's a basic application of physics, but whenever I reach a ceiling grab I sigh my weary little heart and try again. And again. And again.
The good thing about the Flip Side is that it's memorable. The bad thing is that it's memorable from repetition. Honestly, I hate it when my review basically boil down to me whining about difficulty, but it's not even that on its own. Due to the inverted perspective, you end up having to do some very awkward things with your controller, and human hands were not meant for some of the solutions I came up with. The perspective change is not optional either, and honestly I think I would have preferred the ability to have a right-side-up view at least for a few practice runs. The hardest part apparently is a jetpack portion where a friendly NPC advises you that the level can be completed without it. I didn't even get a chance to read all the things had to say because I'd died before having the opportunity. The gist I gathered was "If you find this next part too hard-" Dead. It was like a sad joke. And the punchline was I didn't even get to try it!
Graphically and musically speaking, it's all very solid. The designs are all AAA stuff with abundant stickers and decor. I liked a lot of the chaos actually with misshapen boxes, odd vertical rises, and everything looking like a Rube-Goldberg machine made out of crayons, paint, cardboard, and the souls of orphan children. I felt the visual theme consistent in its inconsistency for as little as that makes sense. It's the sort of place where the phrase 'Banana Shark on Rollerskates' could be used without irony, though I can't recall if any occurred.
I'd recommend The Flip Side if you enjoy those super-hard types of levels that test your patience at embracing futility. You will enjoy the ride if you can grasp the gimmick. I thought maybe that was my problem overall; not being able to think upside down, or perhaps just on the flip side of the box, but based on several segments I'm sure it would still be challenging without it. However, at my last test I did find a few 'holes' that had me fall through to the backstage area. I wouldn't call it a perfect level, but perfection is subjective. Try it out at least, but don't sweat it if you can't finish. (Though I did finish. Somehow.)
TLDR:
Navigation – Layout intentionally confusing. Several times I thought I was lost, but I wasn't actually.
Visual – Chaotic but not too much so. Visuals were good, being craft-like and appropriate to the spirit of LBP.
Sound – Honestly the music grated on me after a while, but I was playing at this level for over an hour, and dying every few moments, so I may be biased in that respect.
Gadgetry – Gadgetry is tight, but there's one long-launch section midway through that doesn't account well enough for players flailing and thinking they've broken something.
Glitches - A few holes, but they may be patched by now.
Story – N/A
Notes – I could justify the trek if you'd let me drop a nuclear explosive on something afterwards.
Wow, thank you so much for the lovely review!
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to complaints of difficultly, I really do understand where people come from. There's a fun story about this level, but not-so fun for me personally
I started this level thinking to myself that I really wanted to try something new, and after a lot of brainstorming and came up with the idea of a camera turnt upside down the whole time. I actually did think to myself "ok, I gotta make this super easy right-side up then." What you find after doing this however is, it gets very boring very quickly :P
After the beginning spark wore off and the level turned to that grinding of work that happens midway through creating, the creation process fell apart to be honest.
I kind of broke down during that period. I am of course overall very happy with how the level turned out, but after about a month, I was tired of it and just wanted it done. That's when I decided how it might be better to style the level this way, were it may seem like a few pieces are broken or awkward. For example, the piece of cardboard telling you it’s ok to skip a segment if it was too hard (this piece was added after I had a couple people play through the level prior to being published, and them telling me it's too hard. so yes, I will listen :P) Or the “cannon” which was in a sense my tribute or (laziness, you decide :P) to lots of those sackboy launchers that don’t quite work. One of the things I would keep saying to myself is “If you can’t make it look good, do that on purpose.” I kind of do feel like it didn’t quite work though. I dunno. You win some and lose some and I really don’t like revisiting levels once I’ve started a new project, too much of a headache (which isn’t what creation is supposed to be about.)
You know, I really do see where people are coming from when they say it’s too tricky and has too many cheap kills. Truth be told that's how I make stuff, and that's how I like them. I do appreciate people playing and telling me what they think and how they think it could be better, but in the end if it’s between me or you on how a certain platform piece needs to fit, I'm probably going to go with my own opinion. Not that I won't listen to you, but I do make levels for fun and for me. Of course I do want to improve however, and that's why I really super appreciate reviews such as this or in game, or responses on the forums, or tweets, or anything. It’s nice to get a fresh look at something.
So thank you. Thank you a whole ton plus infinity plus one. Not just to hidden moon creations, but to anyone who plays it. This is my level, I put my heart and soul into it, which is why I definitely wouldn’t call it boring, because I hate boring. I like different colors and random things popping out at you (speaking of which, there’s quite a few easter eggs I’ve worked around glitches and bugs, including level escape which happened a lot before.)
Thank you so much for this really awesome review, and I hope you enjoyed :)
-megaextremist