Another Gravity Falls game, and another game I’ve reviewed that I was pleasantly surprised to find was not only a good puzzle platformer but a great one in fact. I wasn’t too thrilled to play when I started the game because it started out in that very cheap looking photo story slideshow style as we get the context of the game. The main contextual story being the twins discover a weird incantation in Journal #3 and of course Mabel reads it sending the two twins to two parts of a mysterious cave where they have inexplicably formed a psychic connection. Now together they must move as one to make it through the many obstacles in twenty levels to jump into the Vortex of Doom.

The gameplay is very simple. Up on the arrow keys to jump and left and right to move but we have the added twist of the twins moving as one entity on separate screens. This dual screen gameplay creates a very unique sort of play which requires a more attentive personality so you can focus on both screens and twins and their individual perils. Because at first the twins’ levels will be fairly identical but as the levels progress the levels will develop more differences.

This is where the game gets really fun, in that sort of Super Meat Boy kind of way. As the levels get harder the twins will inevitably hit one of the traps but just like in Super Meat Boy the restart of the level is so instantaneous that it creates a true flow to the gameplay that is hard to come by. As well in each level there are two halves of a star on both of the twins’ levels. Collect both halves and you 100% the level, the stars are not mandatory to collect but like in many puzzle platformers like last week’s Fish Hooks: The Game they help add a healthy dose of challenge to the difficulty.

Now the negatives of the game are as such. Firstly the intro to the contextual story as I said leaves the first impression that the game will feel cheap which it mostly isn’t so a more animated intro would have been appreciated (not full on animated but basically a moving comic). And second the music is kind of dreary and morose for Gravity Falls. Seeing how this game is set in a cave that is to be expected but I think some more upbeat background music would’ve helped in making the music sound less morosely repetitive.

Sadly this is probably the shortest article I’ve written in a long time but that happens when you review a property like The Twin Mystery Vortex of Doom which displays its content in a direct and concise manner. This is a great game that I would love to see get more levels and maybe even a handheld game based off it. If you like Puzzle platformers of Gravity Falls then you’ll really have fun with The Twin Mystery Vortex of Doom… ok seriously there had to have been a shorter name then that in development.