How to play
Tap or press space to flip between floor and ceiling.
About Gravity Flip
Gravity Flip is a runner in which you never jump. Your green square speeds along a corridor with a floor below and a ceiling above, and a tap swaps gravity so that it runs along the other one. Red blocks stick out from both surfaces. Be on the opposite side whenever one arrives and you can run for ever. In theory.
How to play
Tap the screen, click, or press the space bar to flip. If you are on the floor, you rise to the ceiling. If you are on the ceiling, you drop to the floor. The square glides across quickly, and there is nothing else to control. You cannot slow down, stop or hover in the middle.
Obstacles are red blocks fixed to either the floor or the ceiling. Each one is chosen at random, so there is no pattern to learn. If a block reaches you while you are on its surface, the run is over. Tap to start again.
Your score ticks up with time, about ten points a second, so it is a simple measure of how long you lasted.
The speed-up
A new block arrives every second and a bit at the start. The gap narrows steadily until, around half a minute in, blocks are coming twice as often. Meanwhile the whole corridor scrolls a little faster with every passing second. The game is easy for fifteen seconds, busy at thirty and properly demanding after that.
How to think about it
In most runners you ask "when do I jump?". Here the question is "which side should I be on?", and you ask it for every block. There are only two answers. If the next block is on your surface, flip. If it is on the other one, stay put.
The mistake nearly everyone makes at first is flipping out of habit. You get past a block by switching sides, and your thumb wants to switch again straight away. But if the next block is on the surface you just left, you are already safe. Half of all blocks need no action at all, and learning to leave them alone is the first big step up.
Look at the right-hand edge of the screen, where the blocks come in, not at your own square. You know where you are. What you need is the earliest possible sight of what is next and which surface it is attached to.
Flip in good time. The switch takes effect as soon as you tap, so there is nothing to be gained by cutting it fine. When a block appears on your side, change over at once and you can stop thinking about it.
When blocks alternate, floor, ceiling, floor, ceiling, you have to flip for every one, and at speed that becomes a steady drumbeat. When two in a row are on the same surface, one flip covers both. Reading two blocks ahead instead of one is what separates a score of two hundred from a score of five hundred.
Scores
A hundred is a fair start. Three hundred means you have reached top pace. Five hundred or more is an excellent run.
Why it is worth a go
Gravity Flip has one button, like many runners, but it feels different, because it is about decisions more than timing. Runs are short, restarts are instant, and it works equally well on a phone or with a keyboard.
It plays free in your browser with no download.