Gorani & Bird’s Gravity Reversed has secured a Nintendo Switch publishing deal with GaniTani — the same publisher behind Veiled Edge, covered in this coverage’s September reporting — signed on the floor of BIC 2026 in Busan. The deal follows a specific pattern that this coverage has tracked repeatedly this year: a Korean indie developer demonstrating a playable build at a festival, a publisher experiencing it directly rather than through pitch materials, and a signed deal following almost immediately from that hands-on impression.
The Core Mechanic
Gravity Reversed is built around real-time gravity manipulation layered onto standard platformer movement. Beyond running and jumping, players use a Dive attack to eliminate enemies and flip gravity on demand to traverse between ceiling and floor as the stage design requires — the core traversal puzzle isn’t just navigating obstacles spatially but navigating them across two inverted orientations of the same space.
A combo system rewards consecutive enemy eliminations with increased movement speed, directly linking combat performance to the speedrun mechanics that give the game its name. This is a meaningful design choice: rather than treating combat and speed as separate systems that happen to coexist, killing enemies well is the mechanism that makes you faster, which means combat proficiency and traversal proficiency are the same skill expressed in two ways. Chapter-based clear-time tracking and competitive rankings complete the speedrun structure.
The Mode Structure
The default Speedrun mode is the core experience the combo-and-gravity system is built around. Hardcore mode raises the stakes to single-death permadeath for players who want maximum tension layered onto the same mechanics. An Episode mode — presenting the game’s world through cinematic cutscenes — is planned as either DLC or a post-launch update, separating narrative delivery from the core speedrun loop rather than interrupting it.
Hidden stages, collectible items, and an achievement system designed to encourage varied playstyles round out the replay-value layer — standard but well-chosen additions for a genre whose core audience specifically returns to games for mastery and completion rather than one-time narrative consumption.
The Festival Validation Path
The developer specifically notes hands-on response from ages 7 to 60-plus at BIC and PlayX4 — an unusually wide age range for a genre typically associated with a narrower skill-and-nostalgia demographic. GaniTani’s own account of the signing matches this: representatives experienced the game directly at BIC and were impressed by the combination of simple controls and well-executed speedrun design, which led directly to the publishing conversation.
The stated target demographic — North American teens through their 30s who play platformers — combined with 13-language localization at signing (rather than added later) signals GaniTani is treating the Switch release as a genuinely international launch from the outset rather than a Korea-first release with export as an afterthought.
The Publishing Statements
A GaniTani representative: “After experiencing Gravity Reversed directly at BIC, we were deeply impressed by the completed game quality combining simple controls with speedrun elements. We will actively support the entire publishing process so many users can enjoy this experience through Nintendo Switch.”
Gorani & Bird: “We’re glad that a project we’ve prepared for a long time has found a good partner and is expanding to a new platform. We’ll do our best to deliver the fun of Gravity Reversed to more users together with GaniTani.”
Target release: December 2026 on Nintendo Switch, with a specific date to be announced.
