gravitation(6)

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💫 gravitation(6) — the game about mania, melancholia, and the creative process 💫

okay bestie, welcome to section 6 of the manual (the games one, iykyk) 🎮✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

gravitation — a game about mania, melancholia, and the creative process. fr fr that's the whole vibe.

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

gravitation

that's it. that's the synopsis. she's simple 💅

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

Gravitation is a video game written by Jason Rohrer, and it's all about the creative process — plus the way that process bumps up against, intertwines with, and lowkey consumes your actual life. 🫶

It's an art game. Which means: some people are obsessed with it, some people hate it, and there is no in-between. The website has links to places where people discussed it if you wanna see the reactions. 👑

The mechanics are honestly pretty simple. Your "score" is tied to how many "projects" you complete. ✨ To complete a project, you first have to discover an idea — and in this game, ideas are represented by blue stars chilling in the maze above where you start. To get up to that maze you have two options:

  • wait until you feel inspired enough to jump that far 🧚
  • or play with your daughter, which gets you inspired way quicker 💖

Once you find an idea, it falls to earth (so to speak 🌍), and now you have to "complete" the project by pushing that fallen star — which is a white cube now, glow-up complete — into the fireplace. 🔥

The mechanics allow for a whole myriad of situations, and honestly just exploring them is an interesting experience in itself.

But the most interesting part of this game? The emotions it pulls out of you while you play. 😭 The ultra-low-res pixel art helps a ton here — it's not too distracting, and it leaves a whole lot of room for you, the viewer, to interpret. 🎨

Gravitation is the follow-up to Passage, another art game by Jason Rohrer. 🌈

💜 USAGE 💜

Gravitation has no command-line options. none. zero. she doesn't need them 💅

  • The left and right arrow keys move left and right. ⬅️➡️
  • The spacebar is used to jump. Hold it for higher jumps. 🦘
  • The Esc key is used to quit the game. bye bestie 👋
  • The game resolution and whether it uses fullscreen or a window can be set by editing the files in /etc/gravitation. 🛠️

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

The website and discussion: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/gravitation/

The game creator's statement: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/gravitation/statement.html

and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 this little icon of a manual page is dated March 2008 and belongs to the Games section — so go push a star into a fireplace for me, mwah 💖🔥✨

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