Walls become floors on command in Gravity Goblins
The Rat Zone's fourth bite-size game is hoards trinkets, blows it all at the arcade.
The pitch arrives in the collective's own all-caps grammar: “NEW RATZONE GAME #4: GRAVITY GOBLINS.” The game underneath the announcement reel is a gravity-bending roguelite about climbing a strange tower called The Old Stipe, with a movement kit built on jumping, kicking, and a third thing the makers are keeping behind question marks — the caption promises “fancy schmovement,” so worst guesses only. Geometry reorients as you go: walls become floors mid-climb, and the tower reshuffles between runs. Coins scraped together on the way up get dumped into an arcade machine, which is the correct thing to do with money.
Gravity Goblins announcement trailer (excerpt, muted). Full trailer with sound on Steam.
The Steam page, where the game can be wishlisted ahead of a 2027 release, fills in what the reel leaves out: it's a collectathon, with trinkets and upgrades to gather, and something specific buried at the top of the tower.
The Rat Zone interests me as much as the game does. À la Sokpop, it's a collective (“bite-sized Interactive Experiences made BY rats FOR rats”) and Gravity Goblins is its fourth release, after the arctic-vehicle horror game Sender, the action platformer and self-described “most realistic chair simulator money can buy” CHAIRS, and the spooky/cozy Creature Kitchen. Four games, four genres, one toxic-bright palette.
Gravity-as-traversal has a proud archive here. Gravity Rush 2 turned the player from tourist to traveler by making reorientation a whole way of seeing its city. Gravity Goblins shrinks the same idea to arcade scale, one kick at a time.
Screenshots via Steam. Courtesy The Rat Zone.
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