Head Over Heels: The Isometric Puzzle With Two Bodies

The best idea in Head Over Heels takes about four seconds to explain and about four hours to stop finding new consequences of. You control two characters. Head can jump high and steer himself through the air. Heels runs fast and can carry things. Neither can finish the game. Stand them in the same square and they join — Head riding on Heels’ shoulders — and the combined creature has every ability at once.

That is the entire pitch, and Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond spent a whole game extracting value from it in 1987 without ever, as far as I can tell, describing it as a co-op game for one person. Which is what it is.

The genre’s oldest bug, fixed with a shadow

Start with the technical thing, because Ritman gets less credit for it than he should. Isometric games have one structural flaw and it had been visible since Knight Lore invented the genre in 1984. The projection collapses height and depth onto the same screen axis. When a character is standing on something, you can read the scene perfectly. When a character is in the air, the pixels are ambiguous — moving up and moving back look identical — and you are guessing.

Every isometric game of the era paid for this. Last Ninja 2 paid for it most famously; System 3 shipped a game in 1988 where the signature failure is landing in a river you could see perfectly well, because a jumping ninja’s screen position tells you almost nothing about where he will come down.

Ritman drew a shadow. A small dark marker directly beneath the character, sitting on the floor, showing you the plan-view position at all times. The ambiguity disappears completely. You always know where you are, so a missed jump is always your error rather than the projection’s.

The cost of that shadow is a handful of bytes and a few cycles. Ritman had already worked the problem out on Batman in 1986 and refined it here. The knowledge was public, published, and on the shelf. Everyone who shipped an isometric game with a guessing-game jump after 1986 chose to.

Two bodies, four verbs, one joystick

Now the design. Head has the high jump and mid-air control, plus a supply of doughnuts he can fire to stun things. Heels has speed and a bag for carrying objects. Split, each is a partial creature with a partial toolkit. Joined, they are complete — and considerably harder to fit through gaps.

Watch what this does to a room. A puzzle with a high ledge and a heavy object on the far side is unsolvable for either character alone. Joined, it is trivial, except the door to the room is one square high and the joined creature is two. So you go through separately, you cross the room as two individuals dealing with two different sub-problems, and you meet on the other side to do the thing that requires both.

This is a genuinely rich generator, and the reason is that it makes separation into a resource. Most games with a party give you everyone all the time. Head Over Heels gives you a choice about topology: together you are powerful and large, apart you are limited and can be in two places. The rooms interrogate that choice from every angle it has. Some want you joined. Some want you split and coordinated. Some want you to split, solve half a problem with Head, park him somewhere, walk Heels round the long way, and rejoin.

And you are doing all of it on one joystick, switching control between two bodies. There is no AI partner, no follow command, no companion doing something clever off-screen. The other half of the partnership stands exactly where you left it, doing nothing, which is honest and which makes every plan entirely yours.

Bernie Drummond put Ronald Reagan in it

The world is Blacktooth and the four planets it has conquered — Egyptus, Penitentiary, Safari and Book World — and each one needs a crown recovered. The fiction is a coat hook. What makes it stick is Drummond’s graphics, which are some of the strangest things anyone drew on eight-bit hardware.

He populated the game with dogs, fish, Frank Bruno, and a floating head of Ronald Reagan, and none of it is explained or commented on. There is no knowing wink. A Reagan head is simply an object in Blacktooth, treated with the same visual seriousness as a doorway. The surrealism works precisely because the game refuses to acknowledge it as surreal.

Set that against Cauldron II, which reached for a comparable oddness a year earlier and could not resist telling you it was being odd. Head Over Heels keeps a straight face for four planets. The result is a world that feels genuinely alien rather than merely comic.

The children of the two-body puzzle

The idea did not stay in 1987, and tracing where it went says something about how long a good mechanic takes to be understood.

The Lost Vikings, from Silicon & Synapse in 1993, is the direct descendant nobody credits. Three characters, distinct abilities, one player switching between them, and levels that are unsolvable until you stop thinking of them as platformers and start thinking of them as logistics. The studio went on to become Blizzard, which is why the game gets remembered as a footnote in a company history rather than as the design achievement it is. It is Head Over Heels’ structure with the joining removed and a third body added.

Trine, in 2009, brought the idea back with physics and a switch button. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, in 2013, went the other way and gave you both characters simultaneously — one on each analogue stick, no switching, your hands doing the coordination your brain is doing in Ritman’s version. Every one of these games is working the same seam: a single player operating a partnership, where the design pressure comes from the gap between what one body can do and what the situation requires.

What Head Over Heels has that most of them lack is the join. Trine’s heroes swap. The Vikings queue up. Ritman’s characters physically merge into a single unit with combined capabilities and a combined silhouette, and that silhouette is a mechanical fact the rooms exploit constantly. Merging as a state with its own costs and benefits is a richer idea than switching, and it is startling how few games have gone back for it.

What it costs

The criticism is that Head Over Heels is a hard game in a way that has aged into a wall. The rooms are dense, the object permanence means a mistake can strand a required item somewhere you cannot reach it, and the game does not signpost which of its many doorways leads to progress rather than to a dead end. Some of the puzzles turn on knowing that a specific object exists three rooms away, which is knowledge you acquire by dying.

Ritman’s defence is that this is a puzzle game and puzzles are meant to be worked at. Fair enough. The counter is that a puzzle you cannot see the shape of is not a puzzle you are solving — you are mapping, on paper, with a pencil, and the pencil is doing the interesting part. There is a version of this game with twenty per cent fewer rooms and a slightly clearer structure that would be better, and everyone who has drawn a map of Blacktooth on graph paper knows it.

That criticism has to be weighed against what the density buys, which is a world with real geography. You get lost in Blacktooth because Blacktooth is a place. The rooms connect to each other in ways that hold up when you draw them, the planets have distinct architectural logic, and the sense that you are somewhere specific rather than in level seven is the payoff for the confusion. Ocean shipped a lot of games in 1987 that were a sequence of screens. This one is a building.

Where to play it

Ritman was a Spectrum programmer and the Spectrum original is the reference version, with the C64, Amstrad and MSX conversions arriving through Ocean in 1987 and after. The C64 version is perfectly playable and the Spectrum one has the sharper monochrome legibility that the whole engine was designed around — this is one of the rare cases where the machine with fewer colours reads better, because the projection depends on clean edges.

Ritman released the game freely years ago, and there is a well-regarded modern remake with higher resolutions and the original geometry intact. Any of them will do. Play it for the shadow, stay for the moment when you realise the room you have been failing for twenty minutes wants you to walk in as two people and leave as one.