Gravity Rush

Gravity Rush is the most distinctive thing the PlayStation Vita received in its first year. The heroine Kat wakes up in a strange floating city called Hekseville with no memories, a black cat at her side, and along with it the ability to switch which direction gravity pulls her. Instead of running, then, you fall — Kat pushes off, aims at the facade of a distant building, and lands on it as if it were the ground. This creates a kind of movement with few equivalents in the genre: exploring the city is itself the main attraction, and combat is its faster variant, where the heroine picks up speed and slams into enemies like a living projectile.

The game's structure is fairly traditional. Alongside story missions there are side quests, time trials, and gem collecting used to upgrade individual abilities. Kat gradually learns a gravity slide that sends her skimming across the ground as if on invisible skates, as well as a mighty gravity kick that flattens everything nearby, so there's plenty to choose from. Camera control can be supplemented with the gyroscope, so fine-tuning your flight direction is done by tilting the whole console. Visually, SCE Japan Studio went all in on a comic-book stylization with pastel colors, bold outlines, and cutscenes narrated like flipping through a European comic; the French inspiration shows in every corner. The music alternates jazz motifs with restless orchestral passages, and thanks to it, Hekseville feels like a place somewhere between a dream and a postwar European metropolis.

At the time, the game received a very favorable reception for its ideas and atmosphere, while criticism was aimed at repetitive side quests and boss fights that failed to fully exploit the gravity mechanics. The influence was nonetheless clear: a sequel came out on PlayStation 4, and the very concept of free-falling through a city became one of the icons of the entire Vita era. Today, Gravity Rush is worth playing mainly for the feel of movement. It hasn't aged one bit and can still deliver a light bout of vertigo after just a few minutes — something you rarely expect from a video game.