Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, I wrote a small piece on a game called Stick It to the Man!: an adventure game with some mild platforming that was notable for both its Klasky Csupo-like endearingly grotesque visuals and an equally endearing script by a veritable Tyrannosaur of the webcomic world, Ryan North. Conversely, it also suffered from some floaty jumping controls, an occasionally awkward aiming mechanic for its main traversal tool, and a certain reluctance to accommodate "traditional" adventure gamer types who were presumably just there to solve its various inventory puzzles and/or politely (and sometimes genuinely) laugh at its jokes without suffering a few action sequences.

I'm happy/sad/probably just ambivalent to announce that Zoink!'s stylistic follow-up, Flipping Death, is in the exact same Stygian rowboat in all respects. The only thing that's different is that we've switched from psychics and brain slugs to the Grim Reaper and the afterlife, as once depicted by Soul Reaver as this desaturated landscape full of eerie sights and ominous purple whirlwinds that is, geographically-speaking, a mirror opposite of the land of the living. The protagonist Penny is fired from yet another job, takes out her frustrations on a random mausoleum, and finds herself unceremoniously dying when the rotted floor collapses beneath her. Wandering around as a confused ghost, she encounters Death and is promptly mistaken for a temp and given all the powers of said psychopomp while Death takes a holiday to the moon ("The only place where no-one ever died... yet."). Making an honest effort to pitch in on Death's workload, which also includes putting restless spirits at peace by resolving whatever issues are causing them to linger, Penny soon finds out that her deceased body has been possessed in much the same way she's been going around possessing the living.

It all feels very Ghost Trick by way of Day of the Tentacle-era LucasFilm, and like both those properties is often a delight both in its exploration of its ridiculous characters—the possessor is also able to speak to possessed through their own minds, a process some of them don't care for but several more are curiously fine with —and clever puzzles that might require momentarily borrowing someone's talents for hitting things with axes, putting out fires, or blowing real hard, as you go about peacefully exorcising the ungrateful dead and moving closer to Penny's personal quest of recovering her body from this mysterious interloper. In addition to the three or four tasks any given chapter will have you complete, there's also several bonus challenges that unlock "ghost cards" with backstory (that is to say, more jokes) regarding the game's cast. They're often worth pursuing because the process of solving them is no less compelling than completing the main objectives, excepting maybe that one challenge where you had to possess a seagull and shit on everybody (which I suppose might be compelling in a different sense). I will say the puzzles do err towards the hopelessly obtuse, though characters drop hints with their dialogue to such a degree that it compensates for the difficulty a skosh. A typical puzzle might involve helping a burly tennis ghost move on by empowering his only living relative, a weakling named Bjorn: you do this by possessing Bjorn, putting encouraging thoughts in his head, sticking bowling balls into the nearby tennis ball launcher he's using for practice, having him break his arm trying to volley one, and then convincing the doctor to replace the broken arm with the partially rotted limb pulled from the ancestor ghost's grave which requires the (possessed) help of a nearby vulture. For as convoluted as all that sounds, the involved characters drop hints aplenty every step of the way: the vulture confesses to loving pulling up rotted meat, the doctor won't stop going on about his wish to become a bowler instead, et cetera.

However, I did mention some action sequences, so let's reluctantly circle back around to those. Each of the game's chapters is set in a semi-open level (usually the same town and forest area repeated, just with a few cosmetic and cast changes) that requires some amount of platforming to get around. The living (and those possessing them) can take these convenient elevators to higher areas, but in the realm of the dead Penny instead must get around with a combination of jumping across platforms and using her (actually Death's temporarily borrowed) scythe. The way the scythe works is that Penny can throw it in a parabolic arc and it'll stick to solid ground; Penny can then warp to its current location and jump up onto the platform it was stuck to. However, it's not necessarily the most convenient way to get around because the arc is a lot smaller than the indicator would have you believe and if you miss there's no "recall scythe" button: you instead warp to wherever it landed (provided it's still on the screen; it'll just warp back to you otherwise) which might then require you to walk all the way back to where you threw it from. There are some race-like sequences attached to those optional ghost cards which can be a little irksome with these controls, but at least the timer on them is pretty generous (ditto with some "ghost critter" collectibles—used to possess certain characters—that might have you running around grabbing them within a time limit).

Flipping Death is, then, about as imbalanced an experience as its predecessor and perhaps spoils what is otherwise a fine adventure game with some unnecessary action-y bits. Not every Indie game needs to be a puzzle-platformer, after all. However, I'd probably err towards calling it an overall positive experience due to a few factors: A) there's no stealth unlike the first game, at least from what I've seen so far (I'm about 60% the way through? I think?), just a bit of platforming; B) there's a fast-travel to any body you've previously possessed, which is beyond helpful for getting around quickly and is the sort of QoL feature that makes this game's action indulgences entirely tolerable; and C) I think it's just generally funnier and better written overall, perhaps building on the lessons learned from Stick It to the Man! (and potentially Fe; a game Zoink! worked on between SIttM and Flipping Death that tonally couldn't be more different). It's also a spooky game full of ghosts and the skeletons that love them, which made it a perfect choice for the first October IGotW of the year: expect some more spine-chilling (but not so much) Indie examinations in the weeks to come.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Have you really been doing this weekly for like 6 years now?

@sombre: I was planning to stop but they keep releasing more Indie games. I figure I can outlast them though.