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Gravity Circuit: First Impressions

Published: 2023-07-23

Last Updated: N/A

I only have vague memories of Mega Man... Mega Man *anything* (X, Zero, one, forty-two etc.). I admit I never played through any of them, but I must have played one or two levels on friends' consoles in the 1990's. Apparently this means I'm not the best to judge Gravity Circuit for its roots... I am probably similarly familiar with 2 other games that Gravity Circuit reminds me of - Shovel Knight (I think of it when using downwards attacks with Kai) and Steel Assault (surprised I haven't heard more mention of the similarities with this recent title).

As of the time of writing, I have played through the initial stage, and then the one with the steel factory or whatever the one is where you can hop in something like a mech... And I'm definitely planning to play more! I'm not very good at it - I play on Easy and I still die pretty often. Part of it is the controls for me. Maybe I'm slower at internalizing control schemes than I was in my teens, now that those are a couple of decades behind me.

But one thing I can say is that this game is damn fun! There is always weird to reduce a game's joy to the elements that the game is made of... Especially as so much of it has subjective aspects. But it's not hard to see (and hear) that a lot of love went into this game! The music is excellent - it recreates the feeling of old arcade and 90's console platformer with the very intensity and 'upbeat-ness' of the music. The graphics don't have a ton of colors, but everything is well-designed and well-animated. The use of very defined color schemes helps with the different characters of different levels and threats.

The controls feel very tight, but I have to say I'm not super precise with whether I'm punching straight or do the uppercut, for example. There is definitely a learning curve when it comes to getting the most out of basic movements. I haven't used the run button much (left trigger on my Xbox 360 gamepad), but this is one of the many ways in which the simple level traversal has an integrated skill progression to me.

There is also a bunch of customization - you can change different special moves and other perks like a double jump. Haven't experimented too much yet, but the variety along with an almost infinite number of combinations of those customizations likely mean great replayability...

And replaying I likely will this. It's just too much fun!

PS: Regarding similarities with Shovel Knight, I can name at least 2: the potential for the jump + downwards attack, plus the optional checkpoints in the level that cost money, encourage risk-reward considerations.

PPS: I'm playing this one on OpenBSD, of course :-). It runs best with the port of luasteam that I made [1]. Then you just need to have `LUA_CFLAGS=/usr/local/lib/luasteam.so` in the environment.

[1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=169006687623668&w=2