[PAX East] Flipping Death hands-on: Flipping awesome

Zoink Games, creators of Stick it to the Man and Zombie Vikings, have a clear concept of the kind of games they like to make: quirky, artistic, and often laugh inducing genre-benders. They develop something unique each time, whether it resembles a platformer or a brawler, emphasizing character development along the way. Throughout their projects, there’s been a sort of obsession with afterlife, and their latest project might be the giveaway.

Flipping Death is the Beetlejuice game I’ve always wanted.

The 2D action adventure game stars Penny, a recently deceased girl on a quest to find out how and why she died. While the game mostly revolves around death, it takes place in the current life as much as it does in the afterlife. The core mechanism is one of flipping between the two worlds, but this can only be achieved if Penny possess the souls of the living. By collecting a sort of spiritual currency, she can possess any of the wild living characters. There’s a trumpet player, a priest who juggles bibles, a horny old lady, and a guy who licks things with his absurdly long tongue — including other people. They each have specific talents that can be put to use in one life to solve puzzles in the other, so playing around with each one to learn their quirks is key. There’s even an ability to sort of zoom in to their minds and listen to their inner thoughts, until they discover us in there and start strange conversations.

The characters are absolutely bizarre, and the town they live in is equally strange, but that strangeness (coupled with some of the best hand painted art in video games) is wonderful. It reminds me of the Simpsons, in a way. I can envision each character becoming memorable.

The playable PAX demo drops us in as Penny finds her way throughout the undead world. As she bumps into a spirit, she’s told that she must help the lost souls around her solve their personal problems in order to get the answers she needs. Using a gifted scythe, she can teleport around, eventually crossing paths with a dead sailor who is hiding his mistress from his wife.The teleportation mechanism takes a little bit to get used to, since the scythe moves fast, but once we have the hang of it we can zip around the underworld quite quickly. But, it gets us up to platforms that are normally out of jumping height, and can provide a quick getaway when needed. The two worlds are rather large, so the quick movement is welcome.

We come to find out that the mistress is actually a boat named The Mistress, and the sailor needs to repaint it to fool his widow. This leads us to possess the living, get a massive paint can to the boat, and use Mr Long Tongue to lick the paint and cover the vessel. It’s a giggle-inducing path to solving the problem, but it’s worth it to see the lengths that the writers will go for a unique story.

The moving between worlds works well, and the art and style of the game goes along superbly. The characters alone may be enough to draw me in, especially their crazy arm movements when they’re possessed.

Flipping Death is designed for multiple devices, from large TV sets to the Switch’s undocked mobile mode. The developers noted how important it is to manage the camera between the two — it needs to be more zoomed in during handheld, for instance — but the process has yielded some great results. We’ll see more when it arrives later this year.