Games
Flipping Death, the spiritual successor to Stick It To The Man, is getting ready to hit PC and consoles in August. We sat down with the developers to learn more about the cardboard-cutout styled game.
When Klaus Lyngeled started Zoink Games as a way to funnel his creative endeavours back in 2001, he didn’t think there were that many players open to his style of crazy ideas, even in the indie gaming community. He wanted to bring his experience from the animation world and use it to make something really different and freaky – more puppet show than platformer.
But now, more than 17 years later, Lyngeled recognizes how the landscape has changed. “There are so many weird games out there,” he says. “That’s why we had to do something even crazier.”
That’s part of the thought process behind Zoink Games’ latest title Flipping Death. It’s a side scrolling adventure platformer where you take control of Penny, a woman who falls to her death only to find out she’s taking on a temp position as the Grim Reaper. She has to jump between the world of the living and the dead in order to help ghosts solve their problems.
“Flipping death isn’t your typical game. It’s why I started this studio,” Lyngeled says. “I was really into Monkey Island and Grim Fandango growing up. So this has a lot of point and click gameplay combined with open-world-type exploration.”
Flipping Death is the spiritual successor to Zoink’s 2013 title, Stick It To The Man, a game about a man with a giant pink spaghetti arm growing out of his head that gives him powers, because of course. Both games are puzzle platformers, except Stick It To The Man focuses on the main character’s ability to read minds and use stickers to shape the world rather than have the player jump between worlds.
Two sides to every piece of cardboard
At the end of Stick It To The Man, you find out that the entire world is built out of cardboard, something the main character had been suspecting throughout the game. The team at Zoink decided to build off that revelation in Flipping Death after originally wanting to utilise more of the cardboard for Easter eggs.
“We wanted to have the player be able to move the camera and see the other side of the cardboard in Stick It To The Man,” Lyngeled said. “Even if it was only to put Easter eggs on the other side to give a bit of a laugh. It was that thought that eventually lead us to the two worlds in Flipping Death. Everything is built of cardboard and we thought it’d be cool to have a world on both sides.”
After Penny dies in the game, she’s able to jump between worlds and take control of the living in order to complete missions for the ghosts. Some of those include exacting revenge on people who wronged them, while others are about more mundane tasks (at least, if a human was doing them rather than a poltergeist) like painting a boat.
You take on these puzzles by controlling a number of characters, from a dentist with a handy drill to a police officer who can actually arrest people. Every new character ability helps you explore a little more of the village Penny lives (and dies) in and get closer to solving the mystery of her death.
“This is almost like a TV series where you learn new things about the characters as time goes on and you get to do more things with each of them,” Lyngeled says. “They stick around for the entire game too, not just for when you first need them.”
Those unique abilities are the primary link between Flipping Death’s two worlds. Manipulating something in the world of the dead will affect what it does among the living. One example includes the fun little errand mentioned earlier – painting a boat.
“You’ll need to find the paint bucket and move it towards the docks, but you’ll realise that the paint bucket is actually a monster in the dark world,” Lyngeled reveals. “You can get it to move by tricking the monster into chasing you.”
Once the paint bucket is in place you’ll have to use the dentist’s drill to open it and another character’s long and sticky tongue to actually paint. Don’t worry, the solutions get even sillier as the game goes on.
“The dead side is full of a lot of action while the other side is more puzzly, you progress using the tools the characters provide,” Lyngeled says. “And they all have ragdoll physics and will react to whatever you do to them, so there's almost Goat Simulator-levels of weird stuff happening.”
Putting death on the Nintendo Switch
Almost four years after its initial release on PC and other consoles, Zoink Games brought Stick It To The Man to the Nintendo Switch late last year. And now the small team of 25 has started to prioritise the machine after being one of the first teams in Europe to receive a developer kit. “Nintendo really wanted Fe on the Switch to get EA’s support early,” Lyngeled said. “And we had already done Stick It To The Man on PS Vita, which felt very good on a handheld.”
Since then, Zoink Games have developed their games for the Switch first. Lyngeled figures they can work on the Switch’s slower hardware and then scale things up to PS4 and Xbox One. “There’s also nothing weird on the Switch like the Wii U’s second screen,” he says. “The game runs at 30 frames per second on Switch, it’s a really easy console to develop on.”
But the best part of developing for the Switch wasn’t the hardware itself, it was the audience.
Nintendo audiences are always open to something new because of how weird Nintendo can be at times
“It’s something that really helped us since games like Flipping Death and Stick It To The Man do something different by combining platforming and point and click mechanics.”
Stick It To The Man’s humour and story garnered much praise from critics; the combination of the kooky artwork and snappy dialogue sat well with players. That humour is all thanks to the main writer on both games, Ryan North. North and Lyngeled met while doing contract work on an Adventure Time game for Cartoon Network.
North is teaming up again with Zoink for Flipping Death, which is another way the developers are building this new game off the foundation of Stick It To The Man. Flipping Death boasts a bunch of big improvements including fully painted backgrounds and scythe-oriented action bits, something that has taken the team at Zoink quite a bit of time.
“We’ve spent twice as long working on Flipping Death than we did Stick it to the Man,” Lyngeled says. “The characters, the world, the puzzles you have to solve – they all have so much more detail and there is a lot more you can do.”
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