By Kevin Matyi

Staff Writer

“Floating Point,” a free to play game developed by Suspicious Developments, was made as a thank you to fans who bought their previous game “Gun Point,” but is so enjoyable that it would have been worth playing even if it had cost money.

In “Floating Point,” you are a small red dot using a grapple to swing around a randomly generated level of floating platforms. The main objective is to collide with red bars on the platforms for points. The bars grow and you begin to glow more brightly as your velocity increases. You also need to transition between falling in the air due to gravity and floating to the surface of water due to buoyancy. There is no way to outright fail a level, but it is possible to take a long time and score less if you continually collide with the platforms or move slowly.

The game was received very well on Steam. The Curator recommendation for the game is from NerdCubed, saying “My advice is to just play the game for a really long time.” The consensus from other Steam users seems to be that it is an enjoyable, relaxing game that they find no issue with. If you aren’t one of the people who like it, then at least it didn’t cost any money.

The music fits the mood of the game very well. It’s non-intrusive to the experience, tied to how well you are playing at the time and the environment (air or water) you are in. It might help if there were more songs though. The music may fit well, but when one song is looped for several hours, it begins to lose its appeal.

The music is not the only thing tied to how well you play- the difficulty level is as well. If you’re playing very well, then the bars grow so large that they are almost impossible not to hit, but you also no longer have the control that you did when moving more slowly and need to rely on sheer luck to not hit a platform. Conversely, if you are going extremely slowly, then the bars will be smaller and more difficult to collect, but you will have greater control over what you grapple and how you move.

Interestingly, it is somewhat common to go from one extreme to the other in mere seconds. This largely depends on how the platforms are positioned and how well they are utilized.

In addition to the organic difficulty changes in the game, you can manually change the settings in the options menu (escape key) which affect many of the game’s mechanics, creating your own experience depending on how difficult you want the game to be.

“Floating Point” is a surprisingly fun game. Its mechanics are simple, which make it incredibly easy to learn how to play in a matter of minutes. However, the random level generation and ability to create your own difficulty level gives it a high level of re-playability. If you have a Steam account, then try it out. At worst, it will waste some of your time, but it won’t cost you a cent.