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Gravitation
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About the game
Gravitation is a small platform game made as a picture of what it feels like to make things. You play a tiny pixel figure in a tall world of platforms, and you climb, jump and push things around. There is no map and no list of rules. You learn what the world does by doing it.
The strangest part is what you can see. The screen is black except for a box around the figure, and the size of that box moves with his mood: it opens up when he is excited and closes in when he is low. In the bright moods you can push heavier things and the air fills with sparks; in the dark ones the world shrinks to a handful of pixels. Two counters frame the picture: one at the top, and one at the bottom that counts down the time you have left.
The whole game lasts eight minutes, and when it is over it goes back to the title screen. It is an art game by Jason Rohrer, made after Passage, in 2008, about the ups and downs of a creative life. It does not explain itself, and it is better played than read about.
Playing it here
Click Play now, click inside the game and press any key to start. It runs the same eight minutes as the original, with its own little music. Nothing is saved: every play is a new eight minutes.
The game was made for a 99 by 100 pixel picture, and it is shown here at six times that size. We changed a few things for the browser: it uses the SDL 2 library instead of SDL 1.2, it waits for the page between frames (the original ran in a window of its own), and the keys that quit the game, zoom it or toggle full screen do nothing. The game itself is the original's.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Left and right arrows | walk, and push what is in front of you |
| Space | jump |
| Any key | start the game from the title screen |
A few things worth knowing
Push against things. Walking into some of the objects in the world moves them, so try pushing what you find.
Jump to climb. The world is tall, and the way up is through the platforms, so a jump at the right moment is how you get anywhere.
Watch the box. The lit area is the game telling you how the figure feels. If it is small, things you do will go differently than when it is large.
It is not a race. There are no enemies. There is an end, at the eight minutes, and what you do before that is up to you.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take? Eight minutes, from the title screen to the end.
Can I save? There is nothing to save; every play is a new eight minutes.
Does it work on a phone? It needs a keyboard.
Is it free? Yes. The author released it into the public domain, and the source code of this build, with our changes, is available from this page.
Credits and licence
Gravitation was made by Jason Rohrer: all the code, music, graphics, fonts and animation. He placed it in the public domain, which his page for the game states. The game uses the SDL library, here provided by Emscripten. The build served here is the Unix source release of the game, v3, compiled for the web; its source and our patch are hosted alongside the game.