Flipping Death [Xbox]

A spiritual successor to their previous title, Stick It to the Man!, Zoink’s Flipping Death follows the story of Penny Doewood, who after being fired - or ‘retroactively quitting’ - and decides to try and nab a new job that allows her to be her spooky self, gets into an accident and meets her untimely fate, resulting in her inadvertently achieving what she’d intended: a brand new job, as a Reaper.

As a temporary stand-in for Death, Penny must collect Souls in order to possess the living citizens and complete tasks for the ghostly residents of the world. If you’ve previously possessed a character, you can easily teleport to them at any time - and flipping between the living and the dead is required in order to figure out what needs to be done in order to progress. Whilst in the ‘dead’ world, Penny can utilise her scythe to toss it to higher areas in order to zap to its position, and there’s plenty of platforming as well as the ‘flipping’. Levels have main missions, as well as optional Challenges that can be completed - and everything has vague titles that’ll keep you guessing in order to figure out how to achieve them.

You’ll need to think outside the box to figure stuff out, as solutions are often on the bizarre side. You might need to possess a character with long arms to flip a switch, or one with a long tongue in order to scoop up paint (bleurgh) to decorate a boat, so the weird and wonderful - and downright wacky - options are likely to be the correct ones. For the optional Challenges which range from Granny Prix to A Wolf Among Us - similarly vague and mysterious in their requirements - completion will net you Ghost Cards, which give you a bit of interesting backstory into some of the characters and their lives… when they were alive, of course.

With a funky pop-up story book art style with Tim Burton-esque designs, the world is absolutely filled with detail and absurd humour. The level designs are interestingly laid out, with different layers of the world all interweaved by ribbon-like roads and floating structures conjoined by disjointed elevator shafts. The characters are similarly intriguing, with slender limbs, and heads that are split at the jaw - much like South Park’s Canadians - with a unique, illustrative look. Voice acting and sound design are equally well utilised, with a fantastic voice cast that give tonnes of personality and humour to the motley crew of characters, drawing you in to each of their plights and giving you a good belly laugh at the same time.

As you possess characters you can read their minds to get an insight into their morals, as well as their feelings towards other characters and the world itself. Each character has their own abilities that can be used to progress story elements, such as Pokeman’s aforementioned gangly, stretching limbs being able to poke switches and flip their position; but they can conversely be used to prompt emotion in other characters by poking and prodding to annoy them. The Vulture’s grabby talons can scoop dismembered body parts off the ground and drop them off for the surgeon to attach to a waiting recipient, but can also instil fear in the living, chasing down characters and causing chaos wherever you go; and you can spread joy by taking control of the musician to play the trombone and gather yourself a music-loving marching band.

If you find yourself stuck at all, there’s a Hint system that will show you a small glimpse of something, in order to give you a clue as to where to go or what to do, which may provide useful due to how off-beat the solutions to various tasks can be. As long as you explore the world thoroughly, and make use of possessing each of the characters you come across - as well as reading their minds and interacting with anything in the world that you are able to - then you’ll find that most of the quests and Challenges can be figured out without too much difficulty, though some are definitely more head-scratching than others.

Overall, Zoink have created an innovative and enjoyable world in Flipping Death, and we both had a great time with it. Able to be completed in around 6-8 hours, it’s a decent length, keeping your attention but without overstaying its welcome. So if the weird, wacky world of Flipping Death sounds like something you’d be interested in, then you can find it on the Xbox Store for £15.99.

In the end, we decided to give Flipping Death the Collecting Asylum rating of 8.5/10.

Are you interested in Flipping Death? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to Thunderful Publishing for the Flipping Death Xbox review code!