Embracing the Retry Loop with Gravity Circuit

There’s a certain rush that difficult games have in the “30 seconds of fun” loop, and I think Gravity Circuit nails it.

Gravity Circuit is an unapologetic Mega Man X-like game. Fast pacing, SNES-like pixel art, precise wall jump mechanics. I grew up a huge Mega Man fan, so this game was right at home for me. While clearly an homage to the classic games, Gravity Circuit brings its own voice and modern features to the genre.

I’m here to talk about the game’s difficulty. It’s very freakin’ hard at first… at least it was for me.

The stages are full of dangerous enemies, traps, and tricky acrobatic jumps. The enemies especially have tightly tuned “under your skin” placements and projectile patterns. They have a knack for always being in or shooting towards your natural movement trajectory. Health restoration items are rare, too, so you better not be taking much damage. I had to retry sections over and over again, memorizing the placements of each threat before surviving to the next section.

And then there’s the bosses. Each boss has multiple strikes that practically fill the entire screen with dangerous blasts or projectiles. I lost count, but I probably died upwards of fifty times per encounter. The bosses were immune to any of the equipped power-ups I tried. They have way more health than you, too. (You can find health upgrades, though, to even the score.) There are no shortcuts… you have to learn their patterns, which are fast and difficult, and try, try, try again until you victoriously trigger their robot bodies to explode.

In contrast to Mega Man games, Mega Man could power through any difficult boss by simply acquiring and blasting them with their appropriate weakness. Mega Man’s advantage moves are typically so effective that you hardly need to learn the boss dodging or projectile patterns. If you have the right ability, you are in good shape. Unless I missed it, Gravity Circuit bosses don’t care about your abilities.

Edit: On reviewing the speed runs (linked below) it does look like you can chain some super moves together to pummel the bosses. I had no idea!

It’s a difficult game, but it feels so GOOD to play. Each enemy blast, dashing wall jump, grapple shot, and successful super-charged strike is a polished dopamine hit. Enemies explode into little pickups, too, which zip over to your location and give you an “aw yeah” kind of warm collecting feel.

The stages are lengthy but broken into digestible checkpoints. There are no lives or Game Overs, just infinite retries of the checkpoint segments. Each boss has a checkpoint right before the showdown, too, so you won’t need to redo the stage a billion times between the bosses crushing you. Because the checkpoints are fairly common, the game never asks too much of a time commitment from you. Each section can realistically be completed in a minute or two (you’ll be retrying those couple minutes a lot, though).

While dying is very common, there’s almost no downside. You just get up and try again, getting a little bit better with every attempt. It feels a bit like drilling through a solid wall - the encounters feel impossible at first, but every attempt goes a little bit better. Eventually, you’ll persevere through the section and feel like a champion.

There’s nothing particularly new here, by the way. Retrying until you win has been part of gaming forever. Gravity Circuit is just designed in a way to unapologetically kill you a lot and encourage you to try again without making you feel too terrible about it. The tight gameplay feels so good that taking yet-another-stab at a tricky session is mildly addicting.

Being honest, I don’t think I would have stuck with the game if I was warped back to the beginning of the stage after every death - the cost would just be too high for my attention span. Even slow loading times between retrying difficult sections can make players bounce. Gravity Circuit is snappy every step of the way.

Update: I am playing through Mega Man 11 now and instantly hate how it has the lives system. The cost of dying is very expensive. But, I guess that’s part of the fun. I like how Gravity Circuit handles it better.

When designing a game, it’s easy to get caught up in the balance of Fun vs Difficult. Gamers love a good challenge, but too difficult can be alienating. Yet, too easy often means no fun. I like that Gravity Circuit is fine with being very difficult and just designs the costs away in the form of a satisfying and quick Retry.

(Arguably, Gravity Circuit is maybe closer to the Game Boy Advance Mega Man Zero than Mega Man X, which were very difficult games. Despite constantly dying and retrying sections, I loved every minute of it.)

Highly recommended for platformer fans.

Here’s some speed run footage to get a feel for the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbgeb6TBJTw&t=1129s

Buy Gravity Circuit on Steam.

I played on Nintendo Switch.