♦ Livestream Contents
(2:00) “Gravver” by Noser (2024) [https://www.digitalmzx.com/show.php?id=2822]
Checking out Gravver, a physics-puzzler about flipping the direction of gravity to get a ball to reach a goal. Your inputs are limited to pressing space to reverse the polarity of all the gravity wells in a level and giving a small nudge in any cardinal direction once a fairly slow filling meter is full. Wells come in two forms, ones that push/pull the ball away and those that spin the ball around it clockwise/counter.
The game feels very much like something you'd find on a shareware CD back in the day. Hundreds of levels, a surprising number of slowly introduced mechanics and obstacles, and having a lot of fun with filling in the background visible outside of each level that doesn't fill the screen. The game slowly ramps up in difficultly, with narrowing playfields, instant death pools of lava, keys and locks that block off or open up part of the level, and gemstones that need to be hit before the goal will reveal itself.
What at first seems like a laid back game requiring a few well-timed flips slowly develops into a maddening (but rewarding!) exercise in finding the exact path to try and take. The nudge feature in early levels can be used to speed things up, but as the game progresses through it's more than 100 stages it becomes necessary to hold onto it to save your skin or simply reverse course after grabbing a key turns the locked-wall you were about to bounce off of into nothing.
This is a game you can really sit down and play for hours. The two hours of streaming only got me through the first 80-ish levels of the first set of challenges! A second set of levels promises a faster ramp up in difficulty with another 100 levels, and a third short set of ultra-difficult challenges whose first one we peeked at just to see how impossible it looked. It's also the kind of game that would make for a great speedgame, as cleanly executing a stage looks real sharp to see. Someone get this at the next GDQ please.
♦ Play this world in your browser
https://www.digitalmzx.com/play/2822/
♦ Streamed May 24th, 2026
