Gravity Rush: Remastered (2015, Playstation 4) Review

THE CHARM IS ASKEW

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An apple falls from a tree branch. Instead of hitting Isaac Newton on the head, it rolls down a few hills and stops next to a sleeping girl. “There was another way,” her voiceover narration states — perhaps suggesting that gravity, for her, doesn’t need to move in only one direction.

Her name is Kat, and she is the heroine of Gravity Rush: Remastered, a short open-world adventure with a genuinely unique take on movement and reality. Kat feels like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl summoned to inject life into a city that threatens to crumble and quite literally fall into the sky.

Her superpower is the ability to manipulate gravity: flinging herself and objects into the air, running on walls and ceilings, clinging to rooftops, or launching herself into enemies with devastating flying kicks. She helps citizens by transporting them — or their heavy belongings — and defends the city by weaponizing anything not nailed down.

On a personal level, Kat worries about familiar things: where to live, how to make a living, how to belong. Almost by accident, she also becomes her city’s reluctant savior, even as its residents struggle to accept her. Slowly, grudgingly, they do.

All of this sounds wonderful.

Unfortunately, it’s far more interesting in concept than in practice.

Originally developed by Sony’s Japan Studio for the PS Vita and later remastered for PS4 by Bluepoint Games, Gravity Rush is one of those games whose sheer creativity makes its shortcomings sting all the more. Playing it often feels like trying to speak with a mouthful of bubblegum: movement is clumsy, combat is dull, exploration feels unrewarding, and the story — while charming in fragments — never coheres into something whole. The game feels unfinished.

Kat awakens with amnesia, accompanied by a mysterious black cat whose shimmering fur hints at cosmic origins. The cat is the source of her powers; without it, she’s just an ordinary girl. As Kat learns the rules of the floating city of Hekseville, so do we — a clever narrative shortcut that excuses the game’s loose internal logic.

The setup evokes Dark City: an amnesiac protagonist in a floating city governed by unfamiliar rules. But where Dark City ultimately commits to explanations, Gravity Rush simply… doesn’t. The story fades out with major mysteries unresolved, as if a Chekhov’s gun was placed on the mantle and quietly forgotten.

That doesn’t invalidate what is here. Hekseville is a striking, cozy setting: brick buildings, factories, sewers, cobblestone streets — grounded, industrial textures juxtaposed against an eerie skybox of swirling ether and looming vortexes. Citizens wander about, some friendly, some suspicious, some asking for help. Supernatural creatures periodically assault the city — amorphous black-and-red beings with exposed weak points that define most combat encounters.

The presentation is consistently stylish. Cel-shaded 3D visuals blend seamlessly with comic-panel interludes, and character design oozes personality. The narrative unfolds in short, often self-contained chapters that together form a loose portrait of a girl trying to find her place in an impossible world. Characters drift in and out, but none leave much of an impression — none, that is, except Kat herself.

Combat, sadly, squanders the game’s central idea. Despite the freedom implied by gravity manipulation, fighting is restrictive and repetitive. Once you unlock a particular flying kick, there’s little reason to experiment further. Bosses and regular enemies alike fall to the same patterns. Between sloppy hitboxes and unreliable aiming, many encounters could be won with only a couple of buttons.

Even flight — the game’s headline mechanic — feels oddly sluggish. Kat doesn’t soar; she tumbles, spins, and awkwardly drifts until you forcibly reorient her. It’s clumsy, but intentionally so. Kat isn’t a superhero — the cat is doing the work, and she’s just along for the ride. That idea is charming. The execution, less so.

Hekseville expands vertically as the game progresses, and in theory offers immense exploratory potential. In practice, there’s no reason to stray from quest markers. There’s no codex, almost no meaningful side content, and little to discover beyond crystals used for upgrades. The open world exists more as a stage than a system.

And yet — I keep thinking about Gravity Rush.

Despite my frustrations, its ideas linger. It flirts with apocalyptic themes without leaning on pretension. Individual chapters are often well-written, even if they never quite add up. Above all, Kat herself is infectious: kind, resilient, endlessly likable. The game feels perpetually on the brink of greatness, held back by underdeveloped mechanics and an unfinished narrative.

A live-action adaptation is reportedly in the works, which says something about the strength of the core concept. Gravity Rush deserves refinement — perhaps even a reboot — because what’s here is too inspired to be dismissed as merely another cult classic.

People sing its praises because everyone wants to be someone’s champion.
In this case, that champion is Kat.

And for her sake, many seem willing to let the flaws be ignored, as if swallowed by one of those vortexes in the sky.