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This isn't the post I hoped to be writing today, but with a mostly empty gemlog and an itch to write something, it only makes sense to fall back on an old favorite game of mine that I've been wanting to write my thoughts on for a long time. I'm short on time, which makes this a perfect time to talk about a small game.
This might be a little rough as I don't have the time or energy to re-draft, so this will be largely flow-of-consciousness. Please bear with me.
In a nutshell, Floating Point is a game made by Tom Francis where you use a grappling hook to swing around. You play as a little red dot in a level filled with randomly sized and positioned boxes, and by pressing the left mouse button you can attach yourself to one of these boxes. Continuing to hold the button will reel you in, and pressing the right mouse button will release the your tether. The level is split in half by an infinite plane of water. Above the center of the level gravity pulls you down, and below the center buoyancy pulls you up. I tend to think of it as gravity being reversed on either side of the line.
Each box in the level begins with a translucent red bar coming out of it, pointed away from the centerline. These bars become longer as you swing quickly and smoothly without running into anything, whether it be the boxes or the edges of the level, and moving through a bar removes it and scores points with a multiplier based on how tall the bars are at that moment. When this multiplier is high, the music plays louder and a fire-orange trail traces more and more of the path you've taken. When the multiplier is low, your line retraction speed is increased to help you gain some momentum.
There isn't much more to say about the basic gameplay of Floating Point. You swing around and collect bars, and when you've collected all of the bars (or at any other time) you can press enter to move on to a new random level. The next level is always visible in the background, waiting for you.
Floating Point has a surprising amount of depth hiding behind a very simple concept. Activating the grappling hook immediately snaps you to being able to move no further than the lenth of the rope, allowing you to change the direction you're moving in an instant at the risk of losing your momentum and multiplier. Moreover, while the rope visually favors straight lines it unexpectedly wraps around the sides of the level's boxes. This also changes your direction as the closest corner effectively becomes the origin of the rope, and as the effective length shortens your angular velocity around the new origin increases. Poor control will see you flinging yourself into walls, but learning to time your release will dramatically increase your speed and manuverability.
If the game feels off, or you want to have some fun, you can also open the menu with ESC and customize the settings to change your retraction speed (and the low-multiplier bonus), how quickly the bars shrink and how tall they need to be for the music and trail to turn on, and the size and density of the generated levels. Perhaps you can't customize every possible aspect of the game, but it's a fun bonus on top of an already good game.
Floating Point is an incredibly relaxing game. There's enough substance for it to feel like a genuine movement puzzle and keep your attention, but the bar for entry is low enough that you can pick it up within seconds and enjoy yourself within minutes. It's my go-to game for when I'm feeling bored or wound-up and anything else I might turn on feels like too much commitment. The graphics are surprisingly gorgous, the music is deeply relaxing (though the experience is still excellent with headphones off or your own music playing instead), and it's just plain enjoyable. Writing this post has taken longer than I planned not because gathering my thoughts was hard, but because I turned the game on in the background to check my facts and found myself playing it instead of writing.
It's a fantastic game. It runs great on any computer or OS, it's only 60MB large, and it's completely free. There's no reason not to try it out, and I can't recommend it enough.
__________________ Know any other small and/or free games you think are worth knowing about? Feel free to send me an email.