And Yet It Moves is a very neat and charming game for the coffee break, which lets you play as a character made out of paper moving through landscapes that mostly consist of ripped paper as well, which leads to a very arty style of the game. Your mobility is quite restricted, because you can only move to the left and the right as well as jump. But the real trademark of the whole thing is how you interact with the world around you, which you can rotate clockwise and counter clockwise by 90 degrees. When you start the rotation you and all objects around you will freeze for a short moment and when the rotation has finished, your character and everything around it will move with the velocity (e.g. direction and speed) it had before, following the exact rules of gravity and physics.

So if you are for example running around on the ground, above you there are two unreachable rocks and in the ceiling above these rocks there is a niche through which you will have to proceed, here is what you would have to do. You do a running jump, turn the world around while jumping which will lead to you not jumping upwards anymore but rather falling downwards from now on with quite some speed and thereby landing at the side of the former unreachable blocks, which is now not the side of it anymore, but rathermore the top of it. Now you just go on, jump to the second rock and finally reach the niche which will then lead you to new adventures.

Sounds complicated? A sketch of what I just wrote down might help you understand. Still complicated? Laughing about my drawing skills?

Then watch the official trailer of And Yet It Moves instead.

The game, originally developed for a mediainformatics course at the Vienna University of Technology and now already famous for being the winner in the category "Student Showcase" at the Independent Games Festival 2007, consists of two worlds. The first world leads you through a cave (including the situation outlined above) and gives you an overview of the mechanics that you will need to be successful later on. "Later on" means: in the second world, which throws you into a jungle and is much more challenging then the introductory level. This world really requires some serious thinking and skill, but although you will definitely seem to be stuck once in a while the gameplay never feels unfair, the solution which can lead you out of the dead-end street you manoeuvred yourself into is always close. You will die every now and then, but you don't have to be afraid of that and it also doesn't hurt: how could it? After all, you're made out of paper, aren't you? The game saves automatically at different stages of each world, so you don't have to run through the level all over again when you have failed.

Two worlds: that is not really much, but it definitely makes you want to go for more. And at some point in the future we will all fortunately see this wish fulfilled, because the success of their prototype led to the producers announcing that there is a full game in development right now, consisting of sixteen worlds and much more challenges.

If you want to try out the hybrid of a Jump and Run and a puzzle game, you can download the prototype here. After unzipping it you will only need to start the .exe data file and you can immediately start the adventure. I had fun with it, jumped through the world with constant motivation and was finally rewarded with a downright beautiful ending screen.

And if you finished playing it, please try to answer the following question:

How on earth can you possibly play through the first world in under 26 seconds ?