Now that I’ve finished Horizon Zero Dawn, I’ve started Try-It Tuesdays again. This week, I played FLIPPING DEATH by Zoink Games, makers of Zombie Vikings.
Watch a bit of my Zombie Vikings playthrough
FLIPPING DEATH is about Penny, a young woman who fills in while Death takes a vacation. The environment is a 2-D-ish side-scroller with the world of the dead on one side and the world of the living on the other. You flip back and forth between the two sides to solve mysteries and help people.
The puzzle part of FLIPPING DEATH is clever but maybe a bit too obscure. I’ve played a lot of point-and-click puzzle adventures and usually there’s some sense to them – locks need keys, hidden objects need finding, devices need batteries, etc. But in FLIPPING DEATH, you do crazy things like painting a boat with a man’s tongue or making a seagull poop in a pot so an angry cook will shoot a meatball gun at a wiener dog.
Following a weird, Rube Goldberg-like chain of events might sound fun, but mostly it just felt like floundering around in frustration. There are hints available in the options menu but they aren’t very useful when clunky game controls get in the way. I’d have to do the same action twenty times to trigger a cutscene, with no idea why it worked the 20th time but not the previous nineteen. Which meant I spent nineteen tries thinking, “is this correct? am I supposed to be trying to hit a bowling ball with a tennis racket? why isn’t it working?”
I liked the humor, voice acting, music and art style, but FLIPPING DEATH also had a ton of platform jumping and timed races, which are not things I enjoy. So, this is one game I won’t be finishing.
FLIPPING DEATH came out in August 2018 and is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. It’s rated “T” for ages teen and up, due to crude humor, drug reference, fantasy violence, mild suggestive themes and use of alcohol.
~ J.L. Hilton
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