PEGBRJE: Il Filo Conduttore and And Yet It Moves
Aesthetics here.
Il Filo Conduttore is an interactive title made by Playables, those that brought the previous title KIDS to the bundle. Specifically, this title was created by Mario von Rickenbach and Christian Etter, with David Kamp credited for the Hungarian Folk Music. So what exactly is this?
Well… it’s a small story about a cord.
Simply put, players follow a series of set pieces revolving around the interactions of a ball attached to a cord. Each allows the player to interact with the ball and cord by pulling it, throwing it, and many other possibilities to find out. The goal is to find out how the cord needs to be used in order to push forward with the story, playing around with it until a solution is found. Once it is, the screen shifts to the next and a phone in the background rings, starting the next sequence.
It may be easier to convey the experience as conveyed in the same way an art exhibit is. Each set piece is carefully laid out per ‘level’, and while they cannot be interacted with their placement gives mild hints as to what the exhibit is about. This creates that exhibit style, where we as viewers are looking at the artwork without being able to influence or alter it. The cord acts then as the interaction that players can perform, but controlled to not allow for players to accidentally destroy the artwork itself. There is no time limit to this, so players are free to simply explore the cord and its playful sounds until they are satisfied and wish to move to the next.
It’s hard to quantify titles such as Il Filo Conduttore, where there isn’t much ‘gameplay’ to talk about as much as there is the experience that the game provides. It’s captivating in how such a simple premise can lead to such abstract events, all within the span of 10 minutes or less. If you are looking for something in the similar vein of KIDS to confuse yet mystify you, this might be the title.
And Yet It Moves is a physics platformer and the first title released by indie studio Broken Rules, whom some may remember for their title Secrets of Raetikon back on page 12. This is another ‘older’ title, having launched back in 2009 with a Wii port in 2010. So what does one do within? Well, platform across paper!
The player follows the tale of a nameless figure, drawn and torn from the page that created him. Each level is an attempt to return to the page, with the finish being a page in which the player slots into perfectly. To arrive there, however, requires some deft precision in rotational wizardry. See, the protagonist can’t jump that well, and the world is full of paper cut-outs shaped in ways that are not easily jumped, so the player needs to work the world instead. Rotating the world is done with the arrow keys (movement with wasd), and allows for traversal of the map where one might not be able to go. Thing is, momentum is carried; meaning that every rotation doesn’t cut off the directional movement, and gravity adds to the momentum. This can be deadly as the protagonist is literally made of paper, so falling to one’s death is quite easy. There’s also numerous hazards in play aside from this, including colourless voids in which nothing escapes and all is consumed, fires, enemies and boulders that can crush.
This is the backbone of the puzzling part of ‘And Yet It Moves’ as understanding how to land on a specific platform correctly requires some forethought and a bunch of patience. The levels are designed quite well to allievate the issue of worrying where to go next, and the checkpoints — ghost versions of the protagonist — will always point in the direction of the next one to help give some semblance of orientation. Any death resets the world back to the checkpoint, as well as the orientation that the ghost is currently standing in. Players can acquire the checkpoint in any direction, with the only downside being that they must be standing by the checkpoint: not flying past it. This made my planning even more difficult because I couldn’t just hurtle myself past a checkpoint at Mach 3 and avoid being sent back a couple checkpoints.
And Yet It Moves is definitely one of the more creative platformers the be added, focusing less on the player’s ability to land pixel-perfect jumps and more on their ability to coordinate the wonders of physics. It takes some getting used to, especially the rotational directions that I totally screwed up dozens of times, but is quite clever once the ball gets rolling. If you were looking for a specific style of platformer with a paper aesthetic, then try this out and see for yourself.
