On style alone, Sideway: New York is immediately striking.
Downloadable Game of the Week
Sideway: New York
For: Playstation 3 (via Playstation Network)
From: Playbrains/Fuel Industries/Sony Online Entertainment
Rating: Everyone 10+ (mild language, fantasy violence, crude humour, tobacco reference)
Price: $US10 ($NZ12.60)
It takes a genre as old as time - the side-scrolling platformer - and applies a graffiti motif that animates flat, cartoony characters in front of fully-rendered environments.
But style immediately becomes the second most interesting thing about Sideway when it completely and seamlessly turns that world on its ear for the first time.
In Sideway, player and enemy alike exist as flat, living tags on the walls and rooftops, and when you're that ingrained into your surroundings, they can completely shift perspective without disorienting you. Jumping to the top of a building, for instance, will cause a perspective shift that turns the rooftop you just climbed to into a wall full of platforms you must navigate to reach the next rooftop, which might rotate a whole different way to get you back to the ground.
The trick is hard enough to describe on paper, and it's impossible to do verbal justice to the ingenious way Sideway turns different sides of the same world into a single, continuous side-scrolling level that's groundbreaking and classic at once.
The process isn't flawless: Combat and other controls aren't as responsive as their fluid animation would suggest they are, and you'll die many cheap deaths en route to finishing the story (and, if you're up for a stiff challenge, finding every last secret shift and collectable in each level).
Fortunately, checkpoints are generous enough to keep the annoying aspects of Sideway's challenge from overtaking its enjoyable aspects.
Sideway also supports two-player co-op, though it's offline only.
