‘The Land Of Eyass’ Plays With Gravity, Has Inky Art

The last 10 months has been a bit of an eye opener for Matthew Kiehl, Stephen Hoskins and Kristin Parker as they’ve been working on their rather strangely titled platformer The Land of Eyass. You’ll be relieved to hear that they may consider changing that title when they’ve got around to finishing the game. At least for Matthew, the journey has led him to discover that his pen and ink art style translates well into a computer game. It’s certainly caught our eye.

The soothing oranges of dusk and detailed branches dwindle in the backgrounds of The Land of Eyass and it’s remarkably effective. The foreground is less so unfortunately, as it mainly consists of moving blocks and an avatar that lacks much animation, if an intriguing one to look at in its light blue furry suit. Despite that, the game holds together because of its main mechanic, which is essentially a single player version of ibb and obb.

That is to say that there is a central horizontal line running throughout the levels which commands gravity towards it on either side. If you’re in the top half of the screen then gravity functions how we recognize it, but in the bottom half it is inverted. A combination of handling this constant whirring between the two fields of gravity combined with traversing the game’s moving platforms seems to make it an appealing platformer. Though we do have to question where the peril is – essentially you can’t seem to fall to your death, which is of course the most common cause of fatalities amongst the platforming types.

Ah, there we go. Buzzsaws – of course! So yes, there is a high level of threat when moving through the levels. Good, good. Well, if all is said and done we’ll leave you to look over that artwork again. Fabulous isn’t it?