Flipping Death

Genre: Graphic Adventure / Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Flipping Death is a Graphic Adventure with some Platformer elements about a young woman who finds herself meeting an untimely demise, only to be mistaken for the temp Death called for to fill in while he’s on vacation. This game was released on multiple platforms in 2018, including the Nintendo Switch.

Much as with developer Zoink Games’ prior work, Stick It To The Man, this game uses a paper-thin style of presentation similar to the likes of the Paper Mario games, but with a more stylized, caricature sorta’ art style, with characters who speak using flip-top heads like Canadians on South Park. This comes with fully voiced characters and a tongue-in-cheek self-referential sense of humor that’s one of the game’s best qualities – this is a game to aim for if you want something to chuckle at, not anything truly deep or puzzling.

Whereas the previous game had you using a hand coming out of your head to manipulate objects and read thoughts, this game has a mechanic where players “flip” back and forth between the world of the dead and the world of the living by possessing living people, and using the unique characteristics of those people to solve puzzles.

I find this to be a marked improvement over Stick It in multiple ways. For starters, there’s a lot of potential for humor when not only do people find themselves being compelled to move around involuntarily, but being forced to interact with others involuntarily as well, and it’s delightful to watch their humorous reactions as you make them do their unique action to the rest of the citizenry to see their responses. However, the real bonus here is that this doesn’t require the precise aiming that led to frustrating control issues in Stick It, while still retaining some good potential for interesting puzzles.

Having said that, there is an issue here that drags the game down a bit, and that’s the platforming, which is more prominent this time around. Unfortunately, as with Stick It, the platforming here is not very good, and highlighting it only draws attention to this flaw. Not only is your character’s horizontal movement a bit sluggish, but the button layout is not conducive to this sort of play, with players having to shift from aiming a teleportation-enabling scythe to jumping in a way that’s not at all intuitive.

Still, for a decent, funny, stylish Graphic Adventure, you can’t go wrong with Flipping Death, as this retains or improves on all of the good points of Stick It To The Man, and ditches most of that game’s bad points. The focus on Platformer gameplay here may be a bit of a misstep as thie game isn’t a very good Platformer, but overall this is still an excellent Graphic Adventure well worth playing.

tl;dr – Flipping Death is a Graphic Adventure about a young woman who meets her untimely demise and finds herself temping for Death, solving puzzles by possessing the living. This is a clever, funny take on the genre that fixes many of the problems present in the developer’s former work, though the game does suffer a little from its greater focus on Platforming, despite not being a very good Platformer.

Grade: B

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