9 Mind-Bending Levels That Will Melt Your Brain

Pokémon is not a franchise where you’d expect to see mind-bending levels. Charming cosmopolitan towns? Sun-soaked beaches? Copious amounts of tall grass? Absolutely. Bizarre, gravity-defying eldritch worlds? Not so much. But in their quest to stop Team Galactic bizarre is precisely what players encounter.

Distortion World is unlike anything Pokémon had done before, a parallel dimension of myriad tiny islands floating in a dark, swirling void where the laws of gravity are as distorted as the name suggests: some islands are flipped on their sides, as are the trees growing out of them. Step on one and you’re sideways. Step on one that’s upside-down and so are you – along with the trees.

But the best is saved for last, a vertigo-inducing bit of spatial insanity which sees the player travel down a waterfall, from a pool set into an island that is upside-down, against water that is flowing up, emptying into a pool directly below.

Few games turn you upside down, not merely create the illusion, but genuinely allow you to walk on the roof. A good thing, then, that developers Game Freak did not use first person perspective, else we’d all have lost out lunches.