Toodee & Topdee
This puzzle-platformer puts everything into perspective
PC
Toodee takes a leap of faith, the trajectory of the little blue creature’s jump clearly doomed before their feet leave the ground. It’s the kind of missed jump we know from a million restarts in platformers past. But this time, it’s not the result of misjudged timing or poor reaction times. Toodee’s hop into the abyss is all part of the plan.
At the tap of a button, time freezes and the perspective shifts, revealing Toodee to be exactly what their name suggests: a flat sprite. The hills and clouds of our former backdrop are now underfoot, a mosaic on the tiled floor we shuffle across as Topdee, a green creature only glimpsed from above but wrapped in what appears to be a zipped-up hoodie. From this overhead view, platforms are transformed into shoulder-high walls or, in a few cases, moveable blocks. Topdee pushes one of these beneath the feet of our apparently doomed leaper, we switch perspective once more, time unfreezes – and Toodee lands safely.
This is a magic trick better suited to a GIF than the written word, its possibilities immediately obvious in motion, but think of the first time you saw a seemingly flat world rotate in Fez and you’re most of the way there. The difference here is that you’re jumping between two characters trapped on either side of the dimensional divide. Toodee and Topdee exist in different games – a 2D platformer and an isometric block-pushing puzzler that just happen to coexist on the same screen.
It’s no surprise, then, that Toodee And Topdee’s origins lie in a 2018 Ludum Dare game jam with the prompt ‘combine two incompatible genres’. “This was the fifth or sixth jam game that we made,” programmer and artist Gonen Gutholtz says – and, even a few jams later, the one that attracted the most praise. “It was pretty obvious to us that we were going to expand on that at some point – that it could work really well as a full game.”
Gutholtz quit his job as a software engineer to pursue game development full time, in partnership with his brother Ori, responsible for “music and everything sound designrelated”. After attempting another project that it soon became clear was too ambitious for their debut, the brothers returned to their old jam game. “We were pretty naïve and thought it would take a month. We said, ‘The jam version took us three days, it had eight levels; to make 50 levels, a month will be more than enough’. And two years later, here we are.”
In that time, the game has expanded considerably. The build we play offers a selection of stages picked from the first four chapters to show off their mechanical twists. We encounter enemies that exist on both planes, switching their pursuit with the perspective jump. There are plugholes that leak water only when two-dimensional gravity is acting on them; portal blocks that can be positioned to launch Toodee across wide gaps; a beaked doppelgänger named ‘Tookee’, after the Hebrew word for parrot, who imitates the movements of both characters. An unseen fifth chapter introduces scrolling stages.
These are all familiar puzzle mechanics, but they ensure the balance of challenge shifts constantly. In some stages, it’s just a case of puzzling out the solution; in others, it’s about having the reflexes needed to execute your plan. (For anyone who struggles with the latter part, there’s a Celeste-inspired selection of tweakable difficulty settings, including one that lets you slow the game speed in 25 per cent increments.) At its heart, though, Toodee And Topdee is all about that one central trick of perspective. It’s an idea simple enough for the Gutholtz brothers to polish into playable form in 72 hours, but complex enough to hold their attention for three years. And after a couple of hours with the game, we can confirm: the magic hasn’t worn off yet.
The hills of our former backdrop are now underfoot, a mosaic on the tiled floor