Willy Chyr’s Relativity is Escher art come to life

Walk on walls

When you jump off a ledge in Willy Chyr’s Relativity, you can keep falling. Forever.

The abstract world, made up of floating platforms and puzzle rooms, loops. Why climb a huge flight of stairs when you can just “fall” to the top? But that’s just one way to get around. The central mechanic has you flipping gravity. You put your foot on a wall and, suddenly, it becomes the floor.

When I wasn’t exploring the open world during an E3 demo, I had to use colored blocks to solve indoor puzzles. It wasn’t hard to grasp where they needed to end up for me to progress, but getting them there proved challenging, even early on. (You can’t hold onto them while shifting gravity.)

Certain blocks ignore your gravity tampering. You could, for instance, place one on the floor and then turn the floor into a wall. That block type will stick, forming a makeshift ledge for you to hop on.

I only got to play around in one world, but there are others, each with a different theme or pattern. One was straight out of House of Stairs. Their designs make a lot of sense once you know that Chyr does, among other things, installation art. It shows. Relativity is somehow his first game.

He has something cool in mind for how those worlds connect, but wouldn’t say any more about the transitions. I’m curious to see how everything ties together, assuming I don’t get totally lost.