Elephantasy: Flipside Reviews

good job

It's obtuse to figure out where to go and obnoxious to get there.

Lovely, esoteric non-linear puzzle adventure with immersive-sim qualities. It's really good.

If you are OK with pure keyboard gameplay AND you are a fan of Tunic AND you don't mind not being able to see where you jump and end up having to redo an entire platforming portion because of this AND you don't mind that there's no map, then you should buy this. The number of people to whom all four would be TRUE is exceedingly small so I can't recommend this.

What a special game. It has a fair share of problems and it's definitely not for everyone, but generally I think this is a hidden gem that hasn't been discovered by nearly enough people. I suppose you could call it a "puzzle platformer", but "riddle platformer" would be slightly more apt. Even though there are a good amount of puzzles scattered throughout the world, the bigger problem you are aiming to solve is where to go, what to do, how to get to places. This game is extremely self-driven, with Belle being dropped into a world with almost no direction beyond a few hints, and if that doesn't sound like your thing then this game isn't for you. Personally, I found this "open world-ish" approach very refreshing, and enjoyed finding secrets while exploring both worlds. It would be a lie to say the platforming isn't jank, but the roughness of the whole game feels "jank in the right way" to me. You will likely be immediately repulsed when you walk up the cliffs for the first time and have to brace jumping UP a Z-level, but by the end of my playthrough I was completely used to it. There are a few places where the isometric view made platforming nearly impossible, but you are given tools to skip around it... and it almost feels encouraged. Solutions are relatively open ended, and to get better endings you are asked to do things that most games wouldn't even allow you to do, letalone require it. I was frustrated at a few points, and I think that occasionally the crust the game has stops being interesting and starts being annoying. But I think that doesn't matter, and by the end of discovering the best ending (which required a pen and paper), I was wholly charmed by Elephantasy Flipside. If you like the fact that every screen has a name, the open ended nature of the world, and the manual looking like it was scanned through a cheap HP printer from 1999, then this game probably is for you.