"Without gravity, nothing is still, nothing is secure, and nothing is simple."
— 2pt Interactive
Heavenly Bodies is a 2021 game where you play as a lone astronaut doing some maintenance on some unmanned satellites. None of these satellites have any gravity, so you'll have to awkwardly bounce off walls or throw yourself off railings to navigate around in zero-g.
It was developed by 2pt Interactive for PC, the PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
Heavenly Bodies provide examples of the following tropes.
- 2½D: Though the game uses three-dimensional models for its characters and objects, you only move through two-dimensions. This makes the game's zero-gravity movement much simpler.
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: The game's default difficulty setting isn't the largely physically-accurate Newtonian mode, but a modified version of it that allows the player to move through the vacuum of space by flapping their arms. It works like swimming and is there to make it more difficult to go careening off into space with no way to turn back.
- Airvent Passageway: You spend most of "Energy" crawling through tiny air ducts and ventilation shafts to get to the engine at the center of the space station. Unlike most examples, the lack of lighting in these vents is a problem, since bringing a flashlight will take up enough space to make navigation difficult and otherwise you can't see.
- All for Nothing: In the end, what does all your work on the space station accomplish? Nothing, because every system you repaired gets blown up.
- All the Worlds Are a Stage: You go through sections of every level in the last one.
- Artistic License – Physics: The game's normal mode lets you create momentum of out of nothing just by moving your arms at all.
- Asteroid Miners: The lone astronaut on the space station also has to venture off it in a shuttlecraft to mine nearby asteroids for minerals. The minerals are seem to be red, blue, and yellow gems embedded in rocket only collectible by the high-tech drill attached to the shuttlecraft.
- Asteroid Thicket: You'll spend most of "Minerals" navigating through several clusters of tiny asteroids. It is easily the largest area in the game, though it houses little of relevance aside from a collectible, a nod to the last mission, and large asteroids with the precious minerals the level's all about.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The mining shuttlecraft comes equipped with a laser for you to use at your leisure, but it has no use besides melting the one (1) patch of ice in the game.
- Blackout Basement: "Energy" is devoid of light outside of the first and last rooms, so you'll need to rely on the flashlight and your map to get around.
- Broken Lever of Doom: Once you've struggled to get a hang of the weird controls and opened the first door, you go up to the next one and pull the lever with confidence, only for it to break off and force you to find another way through. Then in the penultimate level, the lever that's the only way from stopping an explosion breaks off and leaves you to watch helplessly.
- Continuity Nod: You can find the telescope you spent an early level launching into space in the asteroid field in "Minerals."
- Cliffhanger: "Energy" ends with your astronaut caught in a giant explosion and the feed recording you cutting off.
- Collection Sidequest: Each level has a hidden collectible you have to complete one of the level's Hidden Challenges. Most you have to bring back to the starting area from the precarious position they've been placed in.
- Continuous Decompression: Opening the airlock without closing the door to the rest of the station will cause air to rapidly be pulled out into space with the force of a great hurricane wind. The supply's oxygen supply never runs out and the massive wind will keep blowing until you close either of the doors you should have kept closed in the first place.
- Co-Op Multiplayer: The game has a local multiplayer mode where the second player plays a Palette Swap astronaut who helps you through the levels.
- Critical Annoyance: The mining vessel's alarms will go off indefinitely so long as one of its rockets is left untethered.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: There's no extra lives systems and the game has enough checkpoints that you won't have to redo any goals upon dying.
- Dynamic Entry: The last level begins with your astronaut flying through the (lack of) air until crashing into a wall and coming to enough of a stop for you to take control.
- Explosive Propulsion: You can find a fire extinguisher in the data level and activate it to blast you forward through the level until it is empty. This makes much sense than many examples of this trope because the extinguisher's blast is much more contained that a combustion and the force it gives off is more than enough to push someone through a zero-gravity vacuum.
- Featureless Protagonist: You don't learn your character's race, sex, name, appearance, backstory or what they sound like. You can just assume they look just like you and play the game imagining yourself in space.
- Gravity Screw: The entire game is set in a zero-graviy environment that makes walking, jumping, and crawling impossible. You'll have to move around by pushing yourself off objects and climbing up things hand by hand.
- Hope Spot: There's a brief time where it looks like you can stop the engine overload in "Energy" by pulling a lever, only for it to break and you to be left helpless.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Settings: The game has "Assist," "Classic," and "Newtonian" as monikers for its Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulty settings.
- Level Goal: Each level ends with you returning to the mission console you spawn next to and grabbing onto a walkie-talkie to tell mission control you completed your objective.
- Minimalist Cast: The only character in the game is the bouncy orange-suited astronaut you control. There are no NPCs or enemies to find.
- Mission Briefing: You start each level with a brief description of your assignment. Once you actually start playing, you can pull a document from a nearby console to gain a list of what challenges you'll need to complete, along with a few maps and diagrams of the level.
- No Antagonist: No person or cosmic phenomena is here to get in your way, the greatest obstacle in the game is you and how unused you are to moving around without the Earth to center you.
- No Plot? No Problem!: You don't know who you're working for, who you are, why they want you to complete all these tasks, or even what country you're from. All there is is gameplay and a couple sentences telling you what to do in each level.
- One-Word Title: Every level has a one-word title described the types of mechanics you're trying to fix on the space station. Most of them are pretty simple, though the level with the telescope stretches a little by calling itself "Vision."
- Player Nudge: There are hints in-between starting or stopping a level on the basics of the game to help you if you restarted the game after a long time away or if you've Rage Quit a level.
- Puzzle Pan: Most levels start with a couple black-and-white shots of the terrain you'll be navigating to give you time to think about how you'll get around.
- Sliding Scale of Collectible Tracking: Each collectible you find is displayed on a shelf to the left of the level select screen.
- Some Dexterity Required: The game ties the movement of your right and left arm to the right and left analog stick, leaving you little control of the camera outside of a single button the re-centers it so your feet face the bottom of the screen. This can make it difficult to precisely control your character if you're sent spinning around or have to swing yourself around, since you can't move precisely move the camera where it would be most convenient for you. As opposed to just using one analog stick to walk, this is a complicated and often unwieldy control scheme that will take some time to master.
- Speedrun: The game comes with a speedrun timer for anyone willing to beat a game where you can't walk faster than anyone in the world.
- Wreaking Havok: The beginning of "Vision" gives you every resource you could possibly want to mess around with the game's weird physics. You can send a bottle rock bouncing along the walls while untethered a collection of crates that go flying all over the place at the merest push. This is all fun until you realize you have to open one of those boxes in the middle of the chaos and drags it contents through all the rubbish.
