Flip’s Twisted World is an amalgam of good ideas from a lot of different sources.
The story begins with infant Flip being left on the doorstep of a kindly wizard, which is reminiscent of Harry Potter. The kindly wizard tries to keep young Flip from exploring the dangerous world of magic, but as young men are apt to do, Flip just can’t stay away.
He fashions his own costume with a blue mask that makes him look an awful lot like a slow version of Sonic the Hedgehog. He gets himself sucked into a magical book, ala The Magic Tree House, and finds himself trapped in a twisted world.
Game play involves twisting the Wii remote in the right direction to put Flip in the right position to collect gold coins, kill vicious slugs, and fight his way through various boss battles to return to the real world. Along the way, kindly snails offer helpful advice. A mysterious cube also pops up to help Flip navigate the strange world where a twist of the wrist can turn the world over so that a wall becomes the floor.
Playing the game is a lot like navigating through an M.C. Escher painting, only not as attractive. The graphics on this game look like they’re still in the testing stage. The game is shiny with unstitched pixel seams and Flip is forever losing his corporal integrity and suddenly becoming hollow. It’s annoyingly distracting in what could be a fairly fun game to play.
The perspective is challenging and figuring out which way to turn the world so that Flip can collect what he needs without falling into the sky is sometimes tricky.
The boss battles are challenging, a little too challenging, if you were hoping to get this game for a young child. I wouldn’t try this for anyone under ten and even then there are better perspective altering, puzzle solving games. Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 would both be much better examples.
This game isn’t perfectly tuned to the Wii remote and it gets frustrating to keep twisting it in the right direction only to have the arrows on screen going in a different direction.
Basically, this is a miss, which is too bad because there are some fun components here. The coin collecting is satisfying in that Pac-Man way. The cartoon graphics are cute when they don’t have their seams showing. And the boss levels are challenging.
Perhaps the best most original thing about Flip’s Twisted World is that one of the bosses is a Narwhal. That’s right, a narwhal, the small whale with a unicorn horn. Only, in the game, the unicorn horn is more of a conical drill bit, but still that’s the first time I’ve seen a Narwhal in a video game, well, except the one in Endless Ocean, but that one isn’t trying to kill you.
Flip’s Twisted World earns 2 1/2 GiN Gems.
Editor’s Note: Game reviewed on a Nintendo Wii.