Gravity Hook HD Preview

Adam Atomic and Daniel Barnowsky may be household names in the indie community thanks to their relatively recent success with Canabalt, but the popular survival platformer wasn’t the pair’s first collaboration. They’ll be revisiting their roots this spring, re-inventing their first game from the ground up for iPhone. Gravity Hook HD is the story of a robot, a grappling hook, and an infinite amount of space to climb.

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Adam Atomic and Daniel Barnowsky may be household names in the indie community thanks to their relatively recent success with Canabalt, but the popular survival platformer wasn’t the pair’s first collaboration. They’ll be revisiting their roots this spring, re-inventing their first game from the ground up for iPhone. Gravity Hook HD is the story of a robot, a grappling hook, and an infinite amount of space to climb.

Based on the team’s first game Gravity Hook, Gravity Hook HD will be about climbing as high as you possibly can before falling to your doom. You’ll climb by tapping on blinking circles called “nodes” that you grappling hook can attach to. Once attached your hook will propel you upwards, and you’ll need to find another node to grab on to before you lose momentum.

Gravity Hook HD

Certain nodes are safe to grab on to under any circumstances, while others will explode if you get to close after attaching your hook to them. The closer you are to a node, the further your hook will slingshot you once attached. This is a game that, while fast-paced and arcadey, is clearly rooted in momentum and physics.

We’ve recently spent some time with a web-build of the game (publicly available on gravityhookhd.com) and found that the experience plays a little like a hybrid of Canabalt and Winterbells. The objective of the game is the climb as high as you can without falling, not unlike Canabalt’s distance-through-running objectives. The gameplay, however, reminded us a lot of Winterbells, a popular web game from a few years back in which you’d try to help a bunny climb as high as possible by clicking on bells that were falling from the sky.

While technically a remake, Gravity Hook HD has undergone enough of a facelift that the product will vary greatly from what’s come before. New visuals, audio, and controls will set Gravity Hook HD apart from the original Gravity Hook. The developers also claim to have taken criticism about the original game`s difficulty to heart, with the intention of keeping Gravity Hook HD more accessible to players of varying skill levels.

Despite this new user-friendly approach, the team at Semi Secret Software believe there will be reason for fans of the first game to enjoy this new version as well. While they aren’t willing to tell us what it is, the developers are promising a special treat tucked away after the 500m mark for veterans of the original game. Recently released screens shots suggest that the original version of the game will be included as an unlockable.

No specific launch date has been announced, but some sources are pointing to a possible release before the end of this month.

Jim Squires is the Editor-in-Chief of Gamezebo. Everything you see passes his eyes first, so we like to think of him as "the gatekeeper of cool stuff." He likes good games, great writing, and just can't say no to a hamburger. Also, he is not a bear.