Achieving the Addled Intricacy of Gravity Rush 2

Is there a more dangerous temptation for a designer than intricacy? Intricacy dazzles. It feels both thrillingly frothy and hard-earned. Intricacy delivers the panoramic drama of a landscape in all its complexity, its over-building, its runaway ideas and its addled mis-steps. Intricacy is where you can see the lore right up there on the screen. In games it can give players a world so rich with possibility that they could never hope to truly own it all or explore it all.

But intricacy is a trade, which means you lose something crucial, too. More than anything, you lose the specific power behind a memorable image offered by the architect Louis Khan, who said that the sun "never knew how wonderful it was until it fell on the wall of a building."

To read that line is to exhale. Space! Relief! And in your mind's eye you see a vision of simplicity - the flat plane of a wall and the rich bloom of the sun. Surface and light. It's the world reduced to its most pleasing fundamentals. It's the world with everything else scraped away.

This is what intricacy is up against, and it also explains why a beautiful game like Gravity Rush 2 rarely results in beautiful in-game photographs. Perch yourself on a pleasing spot. Pull out the camera. The shutter closes and - all of a sudden there's just too much of everything. Where does the eye fall? What's the focus? What's the point of all this antic busyness? Where are the shapes?

And yet Gravity Rush 2, like its predecessor, does offer beauty. Its floating cities, Hekseville and Jirga Para Lhao, offer the particular beauty of complex spaces that are home to lots of ideas and influences converging. This is not an easy thing to aim for, and so the game's designers use a couple of big ideas to bring that beauty to the surface and create a little harmony amidst all the muddle. The first of these ideas is unusual. The second is widely derided. Together, though, they somehow make the world of Gravity Rush 2 truly sing.