SERIOUSLY?
How Far Can You Fling a Roast Chicken?
Verticow
Flip Stuff
It’s the latest game from Philipp Stollenmayer, otherwise known as Kamibox. He’s the indie creator who specializes in small and quirky titles like Zip–Zap, Okay?, and Pancake—The Game.
This physics flinger, however, looks markedly different than any other. That’s because everything you see in Verticow was created from scanned public-domain images in the British Library’s vast collection.
After stumbling across the library’s Flickr account one day, Stollenmayer was inspired by the mix of art styles. He investigated and found over a million publicly available assets from the institution—perfect for his new game.
“These images were so randomly thrown together that it completely changed their intention—super-detailed plant studies beside ragged faces and ads for flatirons,” Stollenmayer says. “I wanted to catch that clumsily comical atmosphere in this game.”
In Verticow, you lob your item of choice—whether a cow, banana, bicycle, or shirtless man—as far as you can. To do so, swing it around and around, like a gymnast on the parallel bars, then release. Building up enough momentum sends your object soaring.
Not surprisingly, Stollenmayer is a gymnast. His experience on the high bar helped him get the game’s swinging action to feel weighty and real (even when the object in motion happens to be a gazelle or potted plant). Naturally the game awards extra points for sticking the landing.
There’s more random historical artwork coming to Verticow soon, says Stollenmayer. “I designed the game in a way that makes it easy for me to add new characters and scenes.”
For what it’s worth, we’ve always wondered how far we could fling a 17th-century samurai across a traveling circus.