Shifting World (Nintendo 3DS) Review

It all begins one day when a strange letter turns up from someone calling themselves 'Duke of Shadows' inviting the lead of Shifting World to a seemingly abandoned house that opens up to a parallel dimension. An odd premise, but one that gets straight to the point and places the focus mainly on the intriguing gameplay where the floor could be the roof or vice versa, and the aim is to shift the world from black to white and back again at the correct moment in order to escape.

Shifting World is one of those platform games with a twist, rather like Chronos Twins DX or the recently released Mighty Switch Force! Hyper Drive Edition, and a major one that teases the brain considerably throughout. Come across a black structure that cannot be jumped over? Try switching the world around and suddenly it inverts and becomes a white canyon to leap down into. Although progression is relatively smooth most of the time, there are a few obstacles faced to make matters more interesting, such as special blocks preventing access to the end of level door that require keys to remove them or switches to make blocks appear/disappear as required. The game then starts to take on a Rooms: The Main Building vibe, having to hunt down items as well as figuring out how to reach the goal in each level. This is where the map on the lower screen comes in extremely handy, showing a zoomed-out viewpoint of the entire current location.

Based on Antony Lavelle's creation, published originally by Armor Games as a web Flash-based web game in 2008, the name Shift actually comes from how pressing 'shift' on a regular PC keyboard would flip the world upside down and the white half would turn black. It was a simple concept but one that worked wonderfully well and was been met with so much critical acclaim that iOS and PlayStation Network ports subsequently arrived. A Belgian team, Fishing Cactus, teamed up with Lavelle to bring out the PSN edition and also worked on this new 3DS edition. Rather than simply put a compilation of older games onto the 3DS, thankfully more thought has been placed into this product, with this being the first to take advantage of 3D properly, being able to switch from the 2D and 3D realm with ease in order to unlock even more routes through levels. Additionally, on top of the 60 levels spread across Adventure, Bonus, and Time Attack modes, there is a level editor and level generator that creates levels based on photos of DataMatrix barcodes taken with the external 3DS cameras, and the art style has been given the once over to make it more visually appealing than before.

This is no mere throwaway either, since the aforementioned modes are based around seven locations, broken down into smaller stages, and the difficulty level quickly rises, introducing new facets, all of which are boasted about by the increasingly obnoxious Duke who cannot help but throw in comments on a regular basis. After finishing a stage in Adventure, taking as much time as desired, Time Attack stages open where players must race to the finish line. These can be particularly frustrating, unfortunately, due to the tiny lag in the jump command, meaning more often than not running and jumping results in simply charging off a ledge, normally onto something like spikes that means a stage must be started from scratch. When going through at a leisurely pace there is no problem, but when rushing it really stands out as a major bugbear. Thankfully the main part of the game is not hampered by the jumping issue and, thus, prevents it from dragging down what is otherwise a fantastic experience.