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Gravity’s Edge Review
- Taylor Rioux
- May 15
- 5 min read
Genres are all kinda made up, aren’t they? Where genre norms delineated the FPS from the RPG in the past, games now borrow aspects from many different genres, creating a veritable smorgasbord of ideas and systems that yield experiences not so easily defined. When new norms are established, so much is made of which genres a game falls under. Is it a Soulslike? Could your game be a Shmup, or is it a bullet hell? What even is an open-world game, anyway?
For Gravity’s Edge, “Metroidvania” seems to be the one that will stick. This makes a certain amount of sense, as progression within the game is what one would typically expect from other games given the same moniker; Gravity’s Edge features a large, interconnected, and nonlinear map, and forward progress in one direction is often gated behind the retrieval of some equipment or unlock gathered elsewhere. But I also feel that doesn't fully encapsulate what Gravity’s Edge is.
Game: Gravity's Edge Publisher: Kassle Games LLC Developer: Kassle Games LLC Availability: Released May 6, 2026 for Steam. |
The premise of the game is simple enough: players take control of a spacefarer looking to reunite with their father, who has disappeared during their travels as a Kassler. What exactly being a Kassler entails is a bit nebulous, but they are essentially a force of explorers, researchers, and enforcers currently preoccupied with the looming threat of an alien invasion of sorts. The player character must then become a Kassler themselves, traverse the various planets, and solve puzzles to uncover the truth behind ongoing events.
Doing so is a bit of a mixed bag.
Upon loading up the game, there are a few notable issues and annoyances I encountered. For starters, there is no resolution option within the menus. I am assuming the default is 1080p, but neither of my monitors display this resolution, and there seems to be no way to fullscreen the game, either. Additionally, navigating the menus is a hassle on controller, as there is no dedicated cancel/exit button, so players must manually move over to the “BACK” option to exit any submenu.
On the flip side, once you start up the game, the actual visual style is quite captivating, with a gorgeous comic book-esque design permeating the screen. When you speak to the other characters, they each have their own personalities and speak in a Caribbean-style dialect, adding a little flavor to the afro-futurist setting the game takes place within. I think it would be fair to see my visage and assume I know little about these topics, and you’d be right. The Akan symbology holds no meaning for me, and the Jamaican patois is not a cultural touchstone of any sort for my family—but it will be for someone.
There is an obvious love and care put into Gravity’s Edge by the small team behind it. The influences used to craft it, and the design philosophies behind much of the game’s workings, are laid bare just as much in the dialogue and visuals of the game as they were explained by Kamau Vassal in our interview last week.
So while I can't connect with these aspects of the game, they clearly mean something to the team behind it, and someone out there will be able to connect with it, too. For the right person, these cultural touchstones will remind them of aunties and uncles in their youth, or a dear friend who they no longer see. It will be a moment of reflection on cultures, histories, and shared dreams.
But I am not that person, and all I have is the game I am playing. In that sense, Gravity’s Edge does not wow me, but I am similarly not in any way offended or discouraged by it. Traversal across the physics-based playground is a bit too slow for my liking, and I found myself occasionally frustrated by the character's trajectory when attempting to jump off-planet from time to time. While the realism of gravitational pull is an interesting thought, in practice, it makes navigation quite tedious.
This issue is compounded by the lack of directional visibility—you’re often jumping blindly into a new space without being able to fully see what lies ahead. A single misstep means additional time backtracking and trying to make your way through those same zones, which is made further tiresome given the inherent backtracking and exploration necessary due to its gated progress approach.
For the right person, these cultural touchstones will remind them of aunties and uncles in their youth, or a dear friend who they no longer see. It will be a moment of reflection on cultures, histories, and shared dreams.
Outside of the platforming, there are some shooting elements, as well, with players having a weapon that shoots toward the character’s zenith, and another that fires somewhat horizontally from the character model. The horizontal-firing gun is basically the bane of my existence and is the major source of many of my frustrations with the game.
When you fire this gun, it travels immediately horizontally to the player before somewhat looping around the planet and being brought back down to the ground via gravity’s pull. The trajectory means that the only enemies you can hit need to be directly in front of you, or on the exact opposite end of any given planet. Playing close to enemies is asking to get hit, especially when they take several shots to kill, and the slow movement speed makes lining up that looping shot much more difficult when a foe is chasing you.
It is often much preferred to just avoid enemy contact, running and jumping from planet to planet toward whatever destination you have set in your mind. Unfortunately, this is also troubled by the lack of any real signposting. Many of the planets look so much alike that navigation requires constant map reference.
Locations of objects and points of interest are not marked on this map, but the player does have the ability to set waypoints themselves. That said, the actual progression feels a bit rudderless at times, and I spent much of the game just going places without any real thought to what I was looking for — I didn't really know what I was supposed to be looking for. There are also moments where the game transitions to a scene showing events taking place elsewhere. However, the player character is still vulnerable to damage in these moments, and enemies can move around and attack you during them.
Despite this, I remained charmed by the game in many ways. The celestial phenomena are interesting to interact with, the seven different endings are something to work toward uncovering, and the art, music, and general vibe of the game at least kept me hanging on. I was also pleasantly surprised at how few true bugs I encountered. In fact, the only one I ever encountered was during the ending of the game, where a part of the image was duplicated on screen a few times, seemingly unintentionally.
Ultimately, Gravity’s Edge is a cool little game full of big ideas that it never quite meets mechanically, but it does capture the spirit of community and adventure in its 2-hour runtime on a single playthrough. I like and dislike so many aspects of the game in equal measure, making my overarching thoughts on the game feel mixed and muddied. I really wish I could have moved a bit faster or controlled my aiming a bit better. I wish that these things didn't bother me as much as they do, so that I could appreciate the care and beauty put into the game in front of me more thoroughly.
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