Put down your fidget spinners, all you people who use fidget spinners. If you want something to do while you’re doing something else, there’s very little better than Floating Point – a simple free-to-play game on Steam about grappling and swinging around constellations of floating blocks. It’s by Tom Francis, the creator of other excellent games such as Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Morphblade – but despite that impressive track record I’ve put more hours into Floating Point than any other game of his.
With most games, there’s a certain degree of “you get out of it what you put in”. But Floating Point asks pretty much nothing of you. There’s very little thinking involved – which is the point. You could be watching a video, or waiting between games of Fortnite, or one of a hundred other things that lack that little interactive element with which you can busy yourself. But despite being a fairly thoughtless activity, the moments where you manage to execute the perfect gravity-defying maneuver, or thread yourself perfectly between two close-together blocks, are really startlingly satisfying. It asks nothing of you, and yet it occasionally just presents you with these little pearls of elegant brilliance for free.
Whether you want to follow the game’s objective of passing through all the red bars that expand or contract based on how fast you’re moving (a brilliant concept, by the way), or to ignore the objective completely and just spend time swinging about the level, trying to catapult yourself as high or as low as you can, Floating Point doesn’t let anything stand in your way except the blocks themselves. It’s a lovely little physics-based playground that executes its humble intentions with a flawlessness that I could only hope to achieve while actually playing the game.
Disclosure: Tom Francis has written for us a bit.