Gravity Screw

What goes up... must go... clockwise?

"Don't you die on me, gravity!"

— Soldier, Team Fortress 2

A trope in which the gravity functions in any way other than "what goes up must come down". More common in modern games than in earlier ones, but there were some in the days of the NES. Usually, the change of gravity is local to the player, but sometimes not. Almost always counts as an Interface Screw. More often than not a puzzle level.

Common types include:

• The Planet: The level is spherical, like a real planet but much smaller, and pulls the player toward its center, which may or may not kill the player if they get there.
• The Unusual Planet: Planets don't have to be round; they can be cubes, pyramids, donuts, question marks, or any kind of crazy shape. Their gravity tends to pull in a direction orthogonal to the angle of the ground instead of towards its center. For example, walking over the side of a cube planet will instantly flip gravity 90 degrees towards the next face. A character doing so would say it feels less like walking over the crest of a mountain and more like walking over a cliff.
• The Inverse Planet: The level is round, but in the other way - a hollowed-out space that pulls the player toward its walls.
• Cross Gravity: Gravity pulls in a particular direction that's not down (as seen by the viewer) - maybe to the left.
• The Rotating Castle: The entire level rotates, but the player stays in place. Gravity continues to pull down, but it has a similar spirit to the Upside-Down World mentioned above.
• Toroidal Gravity: Gravity wraps around the outside of a cylinder; objects that start falling without running into something will just circle the object indefinitely.
• The Variable Gravity Chamber: Gravity changes based on your physical location in the room. The direction of gravity's pull is usually indicated in the background, or there are specific devices that change the direction of gravity.
• Fun With Gravity: Gravity changes at fixed intervals. At best, a severe Interface Screw. At worst, timing will be essential to prevent you from flying into a Bottomless Pit (or Ceilingless Sky), in which case expect this level to be Nintendo Hard as all get out.
• Heavy Zone/Light Zone: Gravity is either much greater or much less than usual.

In video games, especially platformers, frequently a form of Gimmick Level.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A car advert of the very late nineties-early Turn of the Millennium featured inverted gravity, with scenes as some guys playing basketball in the ceiling of a bridge just to have the ball falling into the sky, while the car that protagonized the spot went upside down (ie, as it should be)
• Drambuie Extraordinary Bar: When the barman serves the product in a glass, he holds both upside down. One of the many surreal elements of the commercial.

Anime & Manga

• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Kyogai, who was one of the Twelve Kizuki, can do this with his drums.
• Dragon Ball Z used the "spherical planet" variation; when Goku reaches the end of the Serpent Road, he looks around and sees something floating in the sky above him, so he jumps towards it. To his surprise, he starts falling towards it. It is revealed that if you stand on the planet, you experience 10x Earth's gravity, but apparently the planet only affects people or objects within a close proximity to it. Also, the gravity machines the Saiyans use for training later in the series, except those were intentional. And instead of "what goes up must come down" being the norm, it's "what goes down stays down, and everything goes down. No exceptions." Heavy Zone doesn't even begin to describe it—Vegeta claims to have trained (off-screen) at over 400 Gs, and Goku trains at both 10 and 100 (and several levels in between) on-screen.
• Two Stands from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean have the power to mess with gravity, both of which prove to be fantabulously dangerous:
  • Lang Rangler's Jumpin' Jack Flash can turn the surroundings of anything that he spits on into a zero-gravity environment, leaving his victims' blood vulnerable to being sucked out and boiled in the ensuing vacuum.
  • Enrico Pucci's C-Moon turns its user into the center of their very own gravitational field, extending to around 3 kilometers around them. In this range, the direction of Earth's gravitational pull can be redirected away from the user, such as an object in front falling like it was going over a cliff or an object from above "falling" into the air and eventually outer space. The user is unaffected by this, being able to walk on any surface at any angle as it becomes "the floor" to them. On the lethal side of things, C-MOON can also apply its gravitational powers directly to an object like a metal post or even a living creature, both of which result in that "space" being inverted, and in the case of organisms, causing their physiological structure to invert, e.g. a person's fingers regress into their hand and puncture through the other side. Only the unique power of Jolyne Cujoh's Stone Free was able to counter the latter ability by turning the affected areas of her body into a Mobius strip (a non-orientable surface that never turns in on itself no matter which direction you go).
• The Reverse World in Pokémon: The Series is a place where Reality Is Out to Lunch and gravity doesn't seem to abide by any particular rules. A researcher who's been there for years seems to have memorized where gravity is normal, lessened, heightened, or nonexistent, but because there's really no pattern to it, no one else can figure it out (including the viewers).
• In Knights of Sidonia, in order to evade an incoming Gauna, the eponymous ship's captain orders an emergency diagonal acceleration. The ship's artificial gravity generator is unable to compensate, causing many structures to collapse and people to fall to their deaths against the far side of the ship.
• In Guardian Fairy Michel, Salome expresses surprise that there even is a gravity fairy. And yes, it causes gravity to turn wonky... which has been overtaxing marathon runners for several months in a certain village, as it turns out.
• Most of Valvrave the Liberator takes place off of planets, and there are a lot of scenes where the characters float in their ships, or down hallways in their module. Some of the students even sleep floating, in sleeping bags.
• Semelparous: In the Void Between the Worlds, the "walls" actually behave like floors: each has its own gravity effect. Pureblood mures, and kaiju (which contain mure cells), are able to cross the midpoint where they cancel out and are attracted to the opposite wall, but the mostly-human Bulwarks cannot: they always fall back to the wall they came from.

Asian Animation

• In episode 33 of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Joys of Seasons, the egg aliens try to steal the Earth's core, thinking it's the source of its energy and assuming they'll be able to take over the planet more easily if they take it. This causes everything on the planet to float around, which nobody actually minds at first... and then it becomes hard for the characters to breathe, causing the goats to go into space to see what the problem is and how to take care of it.

Arts

• Artist M.C. Escher's Relativity. That has been the subject of many Shout Outs, some of which are noted above.

Comic Books

• In A Matter of Some Gravity, a Scrooge McDuck story by Don Rosa, Magica De Spell uses a special magic wand to turn Donald's and Scrooge's personal gravity sideways. Magica escapes with Scrooge's Number One Dime but despite the difficulties they give chase (hilarity ensues, to say the least). When Donald and Scrooge manage to catch up with Magica she turns their gravity upside down so they're pulled up to the sky.
• Graviton's entire schtick.
• Calvin and Hobbes has Calvin's parents forgetting to pay the gravity bill, and his personal gravity field reversing.
• The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael: When Ichabod is hanging at the edge of the afterlife before he falls into nothingness, he calls for his horse, who just ignores gravity completely.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Saturnians have both anti-gravity and reverse gravity tech. This makes them very difficult to fight on their own ships as gravity can betray their attackers in whichever way they like without messing with the Saturnians themselves.

Fan Works

• Apparently, the Trans-Galactic Republic uses this as a security system in Origins, a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands/Halo Massive Multiplayer Crossover aboard its Star Dreadnaughts. Armando Bailey encounters such a system of gravity-reversal wherein any unauthorized personnel are unceremoniously dumped on their heads while standing on what counts as the ceiling gravity-wise. He is able to defeat it with the Force, which the designers never saw coming. A corporate security system incorporates the "Heavy/Light zone" version to the point where small animals are reduced to bloody puddles should they wander across the plating at full power.
• Rocketship Voyager. The eponymous Retro Rocket doesn't have Artificial Gravity, so the first time someone puts a Tractor Beam on them a crewman is astonished to find he's standing halfway up the bulkhead.

Films — Animation

• Despicable Me features an anti-gravity serum.

Films — Live-Action

• Inception has several scenes in the dreamworld where gravity is sideways, rotating, or simply doesn't exist. This is because whatever the character's bodies are feeling in one dream level (or reality) is carried over to the next lower level. The fact that the dreamers' perception of time is accelerated in each dream level only heightens the experience. Thus, the centrifugal force of driving around a corner results in the dreamers sliding across a hotel's hallway (which effectively becomes a pit), several seconds of freefall allow a few minutes of weightlessness, and a van rolling downhill results in a fight scene across the floor, walls, and ceiling.
• The freaky room at the end of Labyrinth where down is wherever your feet are. Jareth is right at home here — the heroine, not so much.
• The Lodgers: A trapdoor in the floor of a crumbling Victorian mansion conceals a vast, seemingly-bottomless body of water inhabited by a conglomerate of unseen Eldritch Abominations (the eponymous "Lodgers"). Water seeps out from the trapdoor and falls upward to (and slowly wears away) the stone ceiling above.
• In Lucy when Lucy first has an intake of the drug, which causes her to convulse on the wall and ceiling of the room she's in.
• The A Nightmare on Elm Street films used rotating sets to incorporate this trope into several dream-sequences, including the death-scene of Tina, Freddy's first on-screen victim.
• Project Moonbase. People walk along the corridors of the Space Station upside down past people going the other way due to its variable gravity. They avoid floating off the floor because they were wearing "magnetic shoes". Signs request that you PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON THE WALLS.
• At the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, gravity remains oriented toward Coruscant's surface as General Grievous's flagship alternately falls nose-first toward the planet, and is brought under control again, resulting in some fun running-on-walls scenes. The novelization explains that the ship's artificial gravity is on the fritz.
• Fred Astaire's famous rotating room/"Ceiling Dance" routine from Royal Wedding.
• In Star Trek Beyond, the Artificial Gravity fields inside Starbase Yorktown create gravity slipstreams that one can fly on, as demonstrated by the Interesting Situation Duel between Kirk and Edison.
• In Star Trek Into Darkness, the artificial gravity inside the Enterprise fails in one sequence, causing crew members to fall relative to the nearby planet's gravity well while the ship twists and turns around them.
• Sunshine. During the final confrontation on the payload, the laws of physics get a little wonky because it's dense enough to have its own gravity. Two characters fall off the edge of the bomb and are sliding to their deaths, only to find that 'down' is suddenly underneath them, whereupon they can stand up.
• In TRON: Legacy, the Disk Wars area in which Rinzler fights has this feature. Since Rinzler is aware of this, he's able to land gracefully on his feet, unlike poor Sam, whose landings are a bit rougher.
• In Ultraviolet (2006), Violet wears a gravity leveller on her belt that allows her to use this trope to great effect. Her motorcycle has such a device as well, allowing her to flee from her foes along the sides of skyscrapers.
• Space exploration movies made before humanity started going into space for real would often have a comic sequence of the astronauts attempting to eat or drink or just move about the cabin (until they put on their magnetic boots) while weightless. For examples see Woman in the Moon (1929) or Destination Moon (1950).

Literature

• Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road. While exploring the Tower in Karth-Hokesh, Oscar Gordon and his team encounter areas where the gravity reverses itself and the ceiling becomes the floor.
• The mist in the maze in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire acts as a local inverse-gravity zone to anyone who steps into it. After a few seconds of feeling like he's about to fall into the sky, Harry works up the nerve to take his feet off the "ground", at which point he snaps back to reality.
• The Lost Princess of Oz has the Big Bad trap the heroes in his castle by inverting gravity on them.
• The Dresden Files: Harry, in the center of a major Ley Line convergence, stores up a few seconds of gravity from an area the size of a small city to flatten an army of degenerate vampires.
• In the X-Wing Series, exploited by the Imperials who run Lusankya—which to its inmates seems to be a penal mining outpost, but in fact, they are in an area with artificial gravity and are standing on the ceiling. Thus, if they try to escape, they will try to go 'up' to the surface, which is actually deeper into the facility. Corran Horn, after an experience that caused him to form the theory, tested it by tossing a stone up and out of the gravity field he was in; sure enough, the stone fell up to the "ceiling". Later, Corran encountered a cylindrical room with a red line going through it from the floor, along one side, to the ceiling. After attempting to walk the room straight through (with stomach-turning results), he belatedly realized that particular room was a transition room, where "down" was oriented along the red line.
• Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM) was once aboard a Space Hulk (derelict starships that acrette together over millennia) where down would occasionally change if one ship's gravity generator was stronger than the others, leading to having to crawl along corridors to avoid a very long drop.
• In The Grimnoir Chronicles, 'Heavies' like hero Jake Sullivan have the power to do this.
• In The Stormlight Archive, those capable of binding the Surge Of Gravitation can redefine "down" for themselves, or anything they touch. So they can effectively fly by falling up or sideways, walk on ceilings, or kill an enemy by sending him falling up into the sky and waiting for the Surgebinding to wear off and him to come falling back down.
• As Thorinn goes further down in The World and Thorinn, the worlds have lower and lower gravity due to getting closer to the center of the Earth.
• An Older Than Print example: At the end of "Inferno" in The Divine Comedy, Dante (the character) and Virgil first have to climb down Satan's back before gravity inverts at the center of the Earth where Satan is buried. It's a bit of a Mind Screw to go with the Gravity Screw.
• In The Colour of Magic, Rincewind gets the spell Atavarr's Personal Gravitational Upset cast upon him, and spends the next few hours standing on a wall.
• In The Big Over Easy has a Rotating Castle version. Upon entering one of the rooms in Spongg Manor, the most famous surrealist building in Britain, Jack is baffled to find himself sent flying into a wall and then finding himself standing on the ceiling. He eventually figures out the room is spinning on an axis.
• The Outside: In Dr Talirr's craft, all six walls can serve as the floor depending on which one you're standing on.

Live-Action TV

• In the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "The Asset", Dr. Hall's device causes the gravity of the area to periodically change directions.
• Come Back Mrs. Noah. At the start of "To The Rescue", the civilians stuck on the space station wake up to find a malfunction has caused the gravity in their sleeping quarters to be flipped 90 degrees. One pours some tea and ends up squirting the other in the face, then they have to climb the walls to get out the door.
• Professional dancer Derek Hough choreographed a routine with this in mind on Dancing with the Stars that earned him an Emmy Award for best choreography. And it is awesome.
• Doctor Who:
  • An episode had the TARDIS materialise on its side, with the door uppermost. Gravity inside the TARDIS was therefore at ninety degrees to gravity operating in the world outside. The Doctor and his companion did not realise this until they opened the door and tried to step out through the interface between the two gravities. Interesting things happened.
  • The Doctor uses a similar trick to save River Song when she's falling to her death in "Day of the Moon" by parking the TARDIS perpendicular to the nearest surface, so she fell straight in and got caught by the TARDIS's internal gravity. An awkward landing, but a nonfatal one.
• The Expanse: In "Dandelion Sky", after Bobby's commander throws a grenade inside an alien space station at the heart of the slow zone, the station retaliates by suspending him above the ground, disassembling the commander's body, and then using his mass to repair the damage done by the grenade. It then adjusts the slow zone to a fraction of what it previously was, causing every ship within the slow zone to suddenly halt, killing hundreds and critically injuring many more from the massive g-forces.
• Fort Boyard: A new 2021 challenge is "La Cuisine à l'envers" ("The Upside-Down Kitchen"), which involves crawling through a oven to emerge in a kitchen with all furnitures inverted, and the camera is upside-down too, giving the impression the contestant is walking on the ceiling.
• Motherland: Fort Salem: In "Happy Yule!" the group tries to ambush the Marshal (a Badass Native) but he breaks down their spells and whistles one of his own that requires the group to grab on to door frames, walls whatever, to avoid falling sideways.
• MythBusters filmed part of one episode on a zero-G airplane similar to the Vomit Comet. They used a lunar gravity equivalent to test several of the running motions used on the lunar surface. Jamie pointed out the downside of using such an airplane: you go from zero G (or, in their case, 1/6 G) to 2G many times.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • In the season 6 episode titled "Abyss", the System Lord Ba'al is shown to be experimenting with gravity. Ba'al's fortress has prison cells which at first appear to be long hallways; however, once a prisoner is added to said cell, Ba'al turns on some artificial gravity in the cell and the far wall becomes the new floor. Any prisoner within the said cell then sees their cell as a 50-foot tall pit with sheer walls and no doors. The only way to escape said cell to power down the entire fortress, thus turning off the artificial gravity.
• Star Trek: Enterprise:
  • The "sweet spot", located halfway between the bow plate and the artificial gravity generator, is the one place on the NX-01 Enterprise where you can sit on the ceiling. Captain Archer uses it in one episode to get the drop on some aliens who decided that All Your Base Are Belong to Us.
  • Enterprise deals with plenty of this in season 3 while exploring the Delphic Expanse, a region that's basically one big Negative Space Wedgie. One anomaly sends crates flying back and forth in one of the cargo bays, while another one launches plates of food up to the mess hall ceiling.
• In the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Anomaly", the Discovery is confronting a Negative Space Wedgie that just destroyed Book's homeworld of Kwejian. The ship is hit with a gravimetric wave that overwhelms the ship's Artificial Gravity, causing the crew to float before it can reset. The landing is quite brutal, with Tilly getting a nasty gash on her chin, Aidra suffering a cracked rib, Burnham with a nasty gash on her forehead and Owo bleeding from the mouth.

Music Videos

• In the video for Lionel Ritchie's "Dancing on the Ceiling", a rotating set was used to allow Ritchie and a whole roomful of party-goers to do Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Doubles as a Shout-Out to the Astaire example above.
• OK Go hired the "Vomit Comet" to film their video for "Upside Down & Inside Out".

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In the original Manual of the Planes (1987), while on the Elemental Plane of Air travelers could choose the "down" direction and automatically move in that direction. (Provided that they knew that the laws of physics didn't apply in the Plane of Air... otherwise, they'd assume that "down" was whichever direction their feet were facing, and fall infinitely. Not that it would kill them, of course.)
  • The example above extends all the way to 3.5. In the fourth edition, they have some different Gravity Screws. On some planes gravity is subjective, so you can walk across any surface including walls and ceilings. Also, you can simply choose not to be affected and effectively fly with poor maneuverability. Special mention goes to the githzerai and their monasteries in the chaotic plane of Limbo. They practice a unique form of martial arts that actually relies on their buildings' subjective gravity.
  • The reverse gravity wizard spell temporarily invert the gravity in the area of effect. And when it ends, the subjects falls back.
  • In the Spelljammer setting, ships maintain their own gravity (which allows them to hold on to a small atmosphere) which extends from the hull in a horizontal plane. If you fall overboard, you'll pass through the plane, decelerate, then fall back up again and end up floating around like a cork. The risk lies in floating to the edge of the plane — go over that, and you'll be subject to regular gravity for the area. If you're in space, you drift off — if you're above a planet, you fall. Either way you're in trouble.
• A Polish tabletop RPG, Strefa Smierci ("Death Zone"), featured gravity anomalies as one of the dangers of the wastelands; an anomaly would appear as an aftereffect of the area getting bombed with high-level phlebotinum. Unexpectedly walking into one was one of the easiest ways to die there.
• GURPS has rules for operating in high or low gravity. Zero gravity can result in the character becoming physically ill.
• The Paranoia adventure Clones in Space has a space station with gravity towards the exterior. This being Paranoia, it's used for cheap jokes.
• Warhammer 40,000: Space Hulks are the result of derelict ships crashing into each other in the Warp (and often melding into each other) then emerging in realspace. Moving through a hulk may often require walking on walls and climbing down corridors the closer/further one gets from various gravity generator (those that still work, anyway).

Video Games

• The main point of the flash game Mind Scape.
• In Elasto Mania, collecting some apples will change the direction of gravity.
• Odd example with the c64 game Ancipital which should fit the trope but isn't in any of the categories already described - Gravity changed depending on if you were standing on the floor, ceiling or walls, jumping flipped gravity 180 unless you decided to land on a wall.
• The free Space Cadet 3-D Pinball game that comes with many Windows computers has an unlockable effect where a gravity well appears in the middle of the board, attracting pinballs towards it until one is sucked into the center, at which time gravity is normalized again.
• The fourth hole in Fuzzy's World Of Miniature Space Golf was called "Goofball Gravity", in which the ball rolls uphill.
• The original Thrust had reverse gravity equivalents of all the levels once you got past the normal gravity versions.
• In the Flash game Epsilon, you control a ball and a pair of wormholes collecting orbs to power the exit. Eventually, you encounter devices that cause gravity to point in a different direction or turn it off entirely. On level 5g, this message appears;
  As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain.
  As far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
  • ...and all of a sudden, the laws of gravity get bent so hard it's a wonder they don't just fall apart. Not only have the event horizons of the wormholes grown, wormholes now alter gravity entirely. You could be pointing down before going in one wormhole and left after you come out the next. And it also can be changed by the direction you enter them!
• The SNES game Mohawk & Headphone Jack uses the Inverse Planet variation, but in an unusual case for the 16-bit era, makes full use of the system's rotational capabilities so that the floor is always facing down. And yes, the entire game is like this, not just one level. The result can, needless to say, be very disorienting at times. You can see it in action here.
• In the final parts of Limbo there are switches that at first invert gravity for some select objects, later they affect everything including you; and near the end, gravity starts changing periodically.
• Pheus and Mor has areas where the characters can walk on walls and the ceiling.
• The web game Swindler by Nitrome is based around being able to rotate the rooms.
• In The Adventures of Rad Gravity, the planet Turvia has reversed gravity.
• And Yet It Moves is an example where Gravity Screw is actually one of the fundamental game mechanics.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd II: ASSimilation has "Shitty Security Breach", where switches control the direction of gravity, and "WhyWhyWhyWhyWhyWhy", a parody of VVVVVV, where gravity flips with every press of the Jump key.
• Armed and Dangerous features a literal Gravity Screw: The Topsy Turvy bomb, a weapon that consists of a giant screw with a handlebar that screws itself into the ground. It then briefly turns the entire world upside down, causing enemies nearby to fall into the sky (you don't, because you've got this handy giant screw to hold on to). And then, shortly after, fall back to the ground with messy results.
• "Hero Klungo Sssavesss Teh Universsse", a Game Within a Game from Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (in the downloadable content) has arrows that change your personal gravity.
• BioForge has a room, deep in the ruins of the Gravity Master aliens, where you're stuck in orbit around an object in the middle and can only move using your gun, via Recoil Boost.
• The first level of the planet Fog in Blender Bros takes place in the planet's rings, and has low gravity to go along with it.
• Bob's Bad Day, a Puzzle Game by Psygnosis for the Amiga, has bumpers that make Bob fall up, left or right instead of down.
• This is the primary mechanic of The Bridge (2013). Your character can't jump, or even walk up steep slopes, but he can rotate the game world as many degrees as you want.
• But That Was Yesterday has some minor gravity screwing of the "rotating castle" variety when the player uses a swing.
• Castle of Illusion had items in its Toy Palace level that reversed gravity in the level. It was somewhat useful: all enemies on-screen when you pick up said items would be destroyed when they fell down (or up, as the case may be) from the floor.
• Castlevania
  • The circus-themed levels in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin do this with round levels where the stage's gravity points a certain direction relative to the landscape (outward first, then inward), while your characters' gravity is constantly downward. It's certainly a surprise when you defeat Medusa and realize she's been fighting upside-down the whole time.
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night also has the Inverted Castle, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a vertically flipped version of the normal Castle.
  • Super Castlevania IV had a room where Simon was hanging from a ring in the wall by his whip and the whole place rotated first 90 and then 180 degrees around him.
• Cave Story had a strange variant of this in the Outer Wall area, where the player fell normally, but enemies and powerups fell sideways— even the powerups that weren't normally affected by gravity.
• In Colobot, the planet of Tropica has strange plants that emit a strong gravity field around them. You cannot fly while inside these fields.
• The interior of the alien ship in Crysis has no gravity whatsoever, despite being buried under a mountain. The switch is not sprung on you in a hectic situation, and so you have a fair amount of time to get the hang of moving in zero-G before encountering enemies. Thankfully, your suit has some sort of maneuvering system that means you aren't particularly hindered by this. It's actually rather fun once you get the hang of it.
• Crystal Caves has a couple of levels with "low gravity" (although it manifests just as your character being shoved back when he shoots), and there are also levels with reversed gravity. The game also features a reverse-gravity powerup in some levels and a cheat code that lets you reverse the gravity whenever you want.
• In Cuphead, there are pink, floating cards with up/down arrows that, when parried, can reverse gravity (and some of the controls with it) at certain points in Funhouse Frazzle, which may be useful if you want to avoid anything bad coming at you.
• In Jedi Outcast there is a brief zero gravity section aboard the Doombringer
• The "gravity remains down, but everything else is screwed up" version is seen in the Very Definitely Final Dungeon of Dawn of Mana.
• Dead Space had a lot of sections like this. There were anti-gravity chambers inside the ship and external sections where if you jumped wrong you'd just float off into space. The game also has chambers where the gravity plates have gone haywire; if you see a faint pillar of translucent energy crackling up from the ground, do not walk into it! The distorted gravity will rip you apart in an instant. On the plus side, Necromorphs also get torn into pieces if they enter these spaces, either deliberately (though the AI is generally good enough that they'll go around them, they will charge right into them if you're lucky) or by being knocked into them.
• de Blob 2 involves gravity plates, allowing Blob to climb up certain walls. The final level also takes place in space, which has a few small planets.
• In the forest temple of Distorted Travesty 3 there are crystals that reverse the gravity of large rooms. Turning the whole place into some sort of weird 'which way do I need gravity to go now' puzzle.
• Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!: The game has the level "Low-G Labyrinth." It's a Down the Drain level with the gimmick of a decreased gravitational pull due to the strange gasses the Kremlings supposedly ran through the pipeline.
• Dynamite Headdy had Vice Versa, a level where the player could turn the level upside-down using switches. The miniboss here had to be beaten by dropping balls on it. Right after that was Twin Freaks, where the look and attitude of the boss changed depending on whether gravity was reversed.
• In Dystopia, Cyberspace uses a combination of "variable" and "light zone" gravity. In nodes, touching certain surfaces changes the direction of gravity. In tubes, there is no gravity, but up and down change depending on where you are.
• A third of the levels in Elebits have no gravity, and any user-made level can have weakened gravity.
• Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth: The fifth stratum (Untamed Garden) has panels that disable gravity. During this state, you'll be able to hover very quickly across the corridors and fields of the floors (including pits), but the local FOE will also have their respective behaviors altered. This, when combined with the Wrap Around feature in the east and west borders of the floors, plus the need to frequently swap between enabling and disabling gravity with the panels, makes up for very unique toggle-based navigation puzzles.
• In Everybody Edits, gravity tiles and effects can change the direction of gravity, which affects how a smiley moves. There are also gravity effects and world settings, which can increase or decrease the weight of smileys.
• Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout introduces the "Variable Gravity Chamber" variant of this trope in Season 4, with holographic chambers that alter gravity and subsequently your jump height. Blue chambers are low-gravity and allow you to leap much higher (while also somewhat slowing you down), whereas pink chambers are high-gravity and thus allow only the tiniest of hops and skips.
• Being underwater in The Floor is Jelly somehow reverses your gravity.
• In From the Depths, gravity begins to gradually drop off in strength at high altitude. There's a region of a few hundred meters of zero gravity, but above that gravity starts to increase - rapidly - causing spaceships that fly too high to get yanked back to the surface. Part of this is to prevent the Complacent Gaming Syndrome of launching a Beam Spam-toting Kill Sat that hovers beyond the range of ground-based cannons.
• The fourth stage in the original Gradius is an inverted version of the first stage, complete with reverse-gravity erupting volcanoes.
• Kat's main ability in Gravity Rush is manipulating the gravity of her environment to her benefit, be it to fight baddies or just to get to the top of a building quicker.
• Happy Game's second chapter consists fully of rotating 2D circular rooms that wrap around sometimes zoom out and show the player character running around them as if in a loop.
• Heavenly Bodies is set in a zero-graviy environment that makes walking, jumping, and crawling impossible. You'll have to move around by pushing yourself off objects and climbing up things hand by hand.
• The freeware game Jumpman lets the player rotate the room at will.
• In Kid Chameleon, when in the SkyCutter form, gravity was in the direction your Hover Board faced: Either up or down.
• Kingdom Hearts series
  • The original game had something similar, in that the characters walked on the floor, walls, and ceiling of the first room of Wonderland at different points. The difference is that they never jumped from wall to floor and so forth; they had to go around to use doors and such.
  • In Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], you periodically experience this while fighting Rinzler, being forced to fight on the ceiling with inverted controls. It's disorienting enough that it tends to be better to go on the defensive until things go back to normal.
• A level in Kirby's Epic Yarn has gravity switches that can turn the gravity on or off.
• In the second game of Klonoa franchise, there's the level Moonlight Museum where the gravity reverses depending on your position (arrows and colors are present in the background).
• In Last Legacy, Syzygy Forest is full of platforms and special areas that alter gravity.
• Lawbreakers: The first rule to be broken after the apocalypse was gravity. Maps have special gravity wells that pull characters in or up, and some classes can control gravity on a limited scale.
• The Legend of Dragoon: "The Valley of Corrupted Gravity".
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: In the Forest Temple, there are switches you hit to twist or untwist a long hallway, so you could end up entering the room at the other end either walking on the floor or on one of the walls, but the camera always turns to keep Link seemingly on the ground, while everything else is moved.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask:
    • Stone Tower Temple in Ikana Canyon has you switching between the normal position and the flipped one.
    • Although it wasn't even interactive, there's a twisted tunnel at the beginning of Majora's Mask - the player walks along the "floor", but it twists around the room (which the player automatically walks through). Cheating, or bomb hovering over the door allows you to re-enter the hallway, and reveals that it works exactly the same as the twisted rooms in Ocarina of Time.
• Some levels in Life of Pixel have gravity inversions.
• The main way you can move Locorocos left and right in LocoRoco is based on that.
• The Lost Vikings featured anti-gravity zones which sometimes would have to be passed using Gravity Boots because of ceiling spikes.
• The Magic School Bus Explores The Solar System computer game features Heavy Zone/Light Zone gravity for the planet-based platforming levels in the game. Planets with less gravity, like Mercury and Pluto, would allow you to jump really high, while planets with a lot of gravity, like Jupiter (or rather, its moon Io) and Saturn('s rings) would make it so you could barely jump at all (this is actually wrong due to the way centripetal acceleration in an orbit offsets gravity). (There were also items that would increase or decrease your jumping ability.)
• One of the levels of Marble Madness is the Silly Stage, where you must guide the marble from the bottom of the course to the top, rolling it uphill with the same ease the marble would normally roll downhill.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect: Climbing Citadel Tower. Shepard and their team step out of the elevator and onto the wall, as the camera rotates to change perspective. Killed enemies will proceed to fall towards what would normally be down.
  • Heretic Station in Mass Effect 2 lacks any gravity; however, the player and their squadmates remain grounded by using special equipment. Thus, the lack of gravity doesn't affect gameplay...but enemies float away amusingly when you kill them.
• McDonaldland (or McKids depending on locale) has some platforms with cogs on the ends which, if run across, will flip you onto the other side of the platform, reversing gravity in the process.
• In MechWarrior Living Legends, TSA_Extremity takes place on a rotating asteroid, and has a fourth of normal gravity, allowing Battlearmor to go spiralling through the sky in near free-fall. User-made maps such as TSA_Mariokart and TSA_RACE_Kaido feature gravity "spheres" which modify gravity in an area - such as nullifying it, causing gravity to increase by an order of magnitude sideways or creating a gravity well that causes mechs and tanks to orbit it.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man 5 had Gravity Man's level (variable gravity) and Star Man's level (low gravity).
  • Mega Man V in the Game Boy series has Saturn's level, with examples of high and low gravity.
  • Cyber Peacock's level in Mega Man X4 had buttons that flipped the stage (gravity still pointed downwards) every so often.
  • Gravity Antonion's stage in X8. Dark Dizzy's level in X5 has a similar gimmick.
  • In the final area of Mega Man Legends 2, there are consoles that let you set gravity to low, normal, and high, allowing you to access different areas based on the current gravity (such as jumping on a weak floor in high gravity to break it). You're also forced to high gravity immediately whenever you touch security lasers in the area, making you take detours when you need to keep low gravity.
  • Mega Man Network Transmission has the Strange Grav Area, which is basically a Variable Gravity Chamber ^DetailsThis network has Heavy Zone areas, some stronger than others, along with Reverse Gravity areas., and the No Grav Area, which works as a Light Zone throughout. The given Hand Wave for Gravity Screw in Cyber Space is that these areas affect Navis' processing speeds.
• Metal Storm let the player do this. Some later levels required you to flip gravity multiple times in the middle of jumps to clear obstacles without falling into a Bottomless Pit on either end of the screen. It also utilizes Gravity Screw as a weapon with the Gravity Fireball powerup that turns every flip into a blazing charge. There are also the boss battle where both the floor and the ceiling (or vice versa, as the case would be) are harmful, and the only places where you can stand are the very bosses you are destroying.
• In Meteos, the level of gravity on the various planets runs the gamut, but the most notable is Gravitas. The gravity is so high that blocks hit the ground instantly and don't rise at all when they're first matched.
  • Hevendor is the exact opposite. All pieces launched are completely and instantaneously removed from play.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid Fusion has Nightmare, who combines Fun With Gravity and Heavy Zone by making it so you can barely jump and you can't use missiles (they arc straight into the ground).
  • Metroid: Other M uses a similar mechanic in the rooms leading up to Nightmare, as well as during the boss battle itself.
• The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories has this as part of the induced body-horror of the game. If the player gets J.J.'s neck broken, gravity will tilt by 180°. This is required to progress at certain points or to complete certain puzzles.
• In one level in Modern Warfare 3, you play as one of the bodyguards of the Russian president as his plane gets hijacked by terrorists. While fighting your way through the traitors, the plane enters freefall for a few seconds during which you have to fight in weightlessness until someone gets the plane back under control. Until it crashes into the German countryside a few minutes later.
• Monument Valley uses location-specific gravity: gravity pulls down onto whatever you're standing on. If you can find a smooth path to do so, the game will happily let you walk up walls. Given that the game is built around Alien Geometries, this is only to be expected.
• Mute Crimson indulges in this mechanic constantly in its later levels, often coupled with the Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt to great effect.
• In Ori and the Blind Forest's Forlorn Ruins gravity changes based on the direction of the surface you are standing on with the Light Vessel equipped.
• Overwatch has the Low Gravity game mode, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Planet's Edge has a plot use of this, noted in the manual — after an alien encounter causes Earth to disappear, the first clue the Moon colony has that something weirder than the Earth being completely destroyed or transported to another location in space is going on is that despite that Earth is clearly not where it should be (objects can travel through the space), gravitation still acts as if it is there.
• One level in Pixel Junk Eden has an invincible enemy that periodically appears and performs this on you.
• The Distortion World in Pokémon Platinum has you walking on the walls at times, and it kind of messes up the control system a little right after you get back.
  • The anime's equivalent from Giratina and the Sky Warrior, the Reverse World, is even worse with how gravity works. One scene involves Team Rocket all standing at three completely different angles while close enough to reach out and touch each other.
  • Moves like Trick Room and Gravity mess with your mons' speed and who moves when.
• Fairly common in Prey (2006), both with switches that changed gravity, and wallwalks, which were walkways that often turned upside down, allow people on it to defy gravity.
• Some levels in Psychonauts, such as Sasha's Shooting Gallery which takes place on the outside of a cube, and The Milkman Conspiracy, a literally twisted suburb with streets curving every direction. Lungfishopolis from the same game is also an example of a Heavy Zone—your jumps are slower, your Ground Pound is different, and you can't levitate due to your weight.
• The first secret level in Quake had about a fifth of the usual gravity. There's also the secret Satellite level in Quake II.
• Ratchet in the Ratchet & Clank series gets gravity boots from the second game forward. When on a corresponding gravity surface Ratchet and his weapons have their own personal gravity. One game was going to have gravity spheres with a similar effect, but they were deemed too confusing.
• In Rogue Legacy if your character is "born" with vertigo, every bloody room is upside-down. This is about as much fun as it sounds and makes an already Nintendo Hard game so much more difficult that deliberately suiciding isn't uncommon.
• Roll Away is of the Variable Gravity Chamber kind. The plane that the ball is currently rolling on is down and gravity shifts when the ball rolls up an inward bend or down along a 1-cube-width drop.
• RosenkreuzStilette had a level late in the game that worked just like Gravity Man's level, with flipping gravity. Given that the game was a tribute to Mega Man and Castlevania games, it's no surprise, really.
• In Serious Sam: The First Encounter the level "Sacred Yards" contains an area where some places have reverse gravity. Very trippy, especially when quickly moving from one area to the other and back. The Second Encounter has a level with some confusing mechanics, including a room inside a cylinder (with gravity directed towards the walls), a spherical-type hallway immediately after, and several areas with low gravity. How do you like a tiny room where everything constantly bounces up and down at warp-speed, including the hordes of enemies?
• Shatterhand had a level like this.
• The internet flash game Shift does this.
• In Solar Jetman, each planet has a different level of gravity - the higher the number, the more the jet pod will be attracted to the surface. And yes, one planet does have negative gravity.
• Very common in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, especially using Cross Gravity or gravity inversion tied to specific areas. This trope dates back to its very first game:
  • In the original 5 games (1, CD, 2, 3, and & Knuckles), Sonic 1's Scrap Brain Zone, Sonic CD's Metallic Madness Zone, and Sonic 3's Carnival Night, all feature wheels that function as miniature planetoids. Death Egg Zone from Sonic And Knuckles involved spinning anti-gravity passages and a sideways gravity chamber in Act 1, then Act 2 involved gravity frequently switching upside down and back—and one of the bosses could only be defeated by manipulating this mechanic.
  • Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog, the first two games to feature a storyline primarily around space, feature Crazy Gadget and Space Gadget respectively, both defining examples of gravity that can go in any of a number of directions.
    • Sonic Adventure 2's Mad Space level has the direction of gravity being dependent on which planetoid you're closest to. There are also drums in Final Chase that pull you onto their surface when close enough.
    • Cosmic Wall, also from SA2, was a Light Zone, with sections of floaty gravity.
    • Near the end of the battle with the Biolizard in Sonic Adventure 2, gravity is cancelled and Shadow can "freely move" without any constraints... but given Shadow builds momentum by running, his actual movement is mostly limited to homing attacks, for one last screw.
  • In Sonic Heroes, there are switches in Hang Castle and Robot Storm that invert the gravity when pressed. The former stage has two different pieces of background music that change depending on if the gravity is upside-down or right-side-up.
  • In the Nintendo handheld games, The Cyber Track Zone in Sonic Advance 3 has areas within all three Acts where gravity reverses automatically. As well as Cosmic Angel in Sonic Advance, Egg Utopia in Sonic Advance 2, and Dead Line in Sonic Rush.
  • Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity has the Ark of the Cosmos. Anyone in possession of one can control the gravity around them to walk on walls, fly past their opponents, or make tight turns.
  • Sonic Colors is set on a series of planetoids chained together, and as such, the two more spacey zones, Starlight Carnival and Asteroid Coaster feature heavy use of vertical inversion.
  • Sonic Lost World is themed around planetoids and curved levels as well, allowing Sonic to run around curved stages with Toroidal Gravity. The game also uses Sonic's previously established parkour skills to allow him more control in running along walls, as well.
  • In Sonic Forces, the entirety of Capital City has Infinite using the Phantom Ruby to distort the gravity of the stage.
• The Ur-Example of Gravity Screw in video games is located in Spacewar!! where the ships and missiles can optionally gravitate towards the center of the level.
  • The Star Control games use the same setup, with each battle being two ships duelling in space around a planet.
• In The Spectrum Retreat, the 4th-floor puzzle rooms introduce wall pads that, when you lean against them, change your gravity so that you're standing on top of them.
• In Stunt Copter, where you repeatedly jump from a helicopter into a moving haywagon, gravity varies between levels. A helpful readout informs you of the Earth's current mass, eg. NORMAL, HEAVY, or OH BOY.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins has the Space Zone, two levels (plus a secret one) of platforming in low gravity. The floaty jumping combined with a maze of dangerous stars helps to turn the second stage into That One Level.
  • Super Mario Galaxy has the second mission of the Dreadnought Galaxy, which has platforms going normal way up, upside down and sideways at various points along a route where Mario is being fired at by various cannons. Definitely falls under the Nintendo Hard bit and then there's the purple coin mission. And similar kinds of puzzles in Bowser's Dark Matter Plant.
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2 has Flipsville, in which you flip grates to reverse gravity. Where gravity's pointing is denoted by arrows in the sky. There's also Upside Dizzy, which not only has segments of this mansion that have gravity point towards the ceiling, gravity flips in several parts of the level on its own.
  • Super Mario Maker 2: The Underground and Sky level themes exhibit this trait during night mode, respectively by having the whole design and all elements within upside down and lowering the gravity.
  • The Whoa Zone of Super Paper Mario has the "hit a switch" variety. Sometimes even passing through a door could do it, depending on the doors' relative orientations. In addition, the Tiny Planet (Chapter 4-2) was a Light Zone.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door had the moon as a Light Zone, with good reason.
  • Luigi's Mansion has a few switches in various rooms that reverse gravity. They always come in pairs, because the doors are too low to the ground to exit without being on the floor.
  • Mario Kart 8 uses anti-gravity as a new gameplay mechanic, allowing racers to drive sideways and even upside down.
• Super Smash Bros., which features several series with gravity screws, has several levels that include them as a minor part of the design:
  • The Brinstar Depths level in Melee rotates. However, gravity continues to pull in the same direction, so if you don't jump just before it happens, you'll get pulled off of the level.
  • Melee's Battlefield features floaty gravity, but only when fighting wireframes.
  • Brawl's Spear Pillar from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl features the Pokémon Palkia, ruler of space. As a result of its powers, the stage may invert vertically, with matching gravity. Starting in for Wii U, it is also available as a Poké Ball Pokémon, with the same effect.
  • In the Wii U game, two of the levels (one from Super Mario Galaxy, another from Sonic Lost World) take place on a curved platform that acts as the source of Toroidal gravity. Most projectiles curve accordingly.
• Later on in System Shock 2, you make it into the UNN Rickenbacker, where the artificial gravity has flipped upside down. Fighting cyborg assassins in an inverted chapel is a rather creepy experience. And by reversing the gravity, you have most likely caused the death of a certain character by dropping him unexpectedly on the ceiling.
• In Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 4: The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood, one of the buttons on De Singe's Auto-Trepanation Helmet turns the whole room in the lab upside-down along with Guybrush for a few seconds.
• Part of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon in Tales of the Abyss is like this, of the rotating room variety.
• The upper floors of Constantine's mansion in the Thief mission "The Sword" feature Gravity Screw effects, among other weirdness.
• In Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose!, during the "Space Opera" level, there's a section where Buster must hit the switches to invert the gravity to get a giant cannonball to break through the ceiling and floor.
• Tread Marks' "The Moon" level takes place on the Moon, at 1/6th normal gravity. When you have tanks screaming down the terrain at 100+kph racing each other, it can get pretty chaotic when someone fires a Dirt Ball ahead of them to create a ramp - and launches everyone into the sky. The low gravity also interferes with the tank's grip on the terrain - Multi-Track Drifting is easier due to lower grip but must be initiated long before the actual turn.
• TRI: Of Friendship and Madness has a lot of fun with this trope. Nearly every chapter incorporates some form of gravity defiance, and almost all examples in the trope's list are covered in this game. You'll be scaling walls and ceilings with the TRI and dealing with the constant shifting gravity of cylindrical rooms, misty hallways, and planets.
• Should you choose the Genocide path in Undertale, you will be confronted by Sans the skeleton who will throw you for a loop by rapidly changing which direction counts as 'down' for the purposes of gravity during the many Bullet Hell sections involved in the fight. And this isn't even the most unfair attack in that fight.
• Unreal II: The Awakening has a ship's artificial gravity play up, first allowing you to jump large distances, then pulling you against different surfaces.
• Several levels in Unreal Tournament have low gravity, either everywhere in the level or just in certain areas. The game also comes with a mutator you can use to force low gravity when playing, regardless of what the map specifies. It is also possible to design levels with rooms having reverse gravity or the ability to walk up on the walls.^note Or cheating with warpzones to make it look like that. It's tricky and has a good chance of crashing the game but it's possible. Simply setting negative zone gravity would make players fall upwards and do a headstand on the ceiling. In fact, there is a map trigger^note NitrogenZone that can be used to induce a zero gravity environment where the player can move as if underwater.
• Vexx has an Upside-Down World puzzle in one chamber, where the entire screen flips upside down along with the world.
• VVVVVV's entire premise is based on this and is modified by many, many obstacles.
• World of Goo features a Planet-type level and a Rotating Castle-type level.
• Kael'thas Sunstrider in World of Warcraft turns the gravity off completely, leaving players "swimming" in the air.
• The gimmick of the Plizzanet level in Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void is its gravity effects. It's hard to notice at first since the first area is large enough to hide the effect, but it becomes very apparent when you reach the core and the "Noid Roid" sub-area.
• One of the Yoshi's Island games had an area where you had to switch repeatedly between the right-side-up area and the upside-down area to avoid dangers.
  • Another Yoshi game, Yoshi's Universal Gravitation, had a tilt sensor inside the cartridge, allowing the player to control gravity at will. It only allowed for angling sideways, however.

Web Animation

• The CCC series has a rewind-style episode where gravity is altered for someone thanks to a drug. On a sobering note, if you find and watch the forward version, this trope is played realistically when the drug wears off and he begins his long fall back down...
• Dead Fantasy Part II features a running/falling battle down the side of a miles-high stone tower.

Web Comics

• In Schlock Mercenary, gravity is a weapon and gets used in all sorts of perspective-bending ways. The "Mallcop Command" arc even involved a group of Parkata Urbatsu runners who took advantage of the lack of Artificial Gravity in an old space station to run amok for fun and profit (by selling videos of the acts, not theft).
• Tove: The gravity of the planetoids that Tove bounces between when she is first transported to space seems to have a gravity of their own, although it appears one is just fine standing on any of them as long as they don't jump.
• The xkcd strip "The Man Who Fell Sideways", which is about a man who falls sideways.

Web Original

• Two examples from I Can Has Cheezburger are "Up yours, gravity!" and "Turn gravity back on QUICK!."
• Pay Me, Bug!: Part of the standard procedure for repelling boarders aboard the Fool's Errand is to turn the gravity on and off according to a prearranged schedule. Since any boarders wouldn't know the schedule, they would be unprepared for the sudden shifts in gravity. In addition, individual crewmen can have the bridge change the gravity in their specific section as an additional weapon.

Web Videos

• Upside down ice fishing

Western Animation

• Futurama featured a parody of M.C. Escher's famed painting.
  • So did the theme song to the animated version of The Addams Family.
• What is the quickest way to abort a baby in Drawn Together? The M.C. Escher-Room!
• The Simpsons used the M.C. Escher Relativity joke twice. Once◊ for a Couch Gag and in the movie when Homer fell down all of the stairs.
• Gravity Falls is NAMED after this trope. While first dismissed as a Punny Name, it becomes an extremely Meaningful Name after Stan activates the portal and the entire town is torn to pieces by gravity anomalies.
• Les Shadoks: Planet Shadok is inhabited by two kinds of Shadoks - one kind with right-side-up legs, which live on the top of the planet; and the other kind with upside-down legs, which live on the underside of the planet.
• Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: In "Don't Fool With The Phantom", Shaggy and Scooby think they've fallen afoul of this trope when they flee into the wax museum's Topsy Turvey Room, where the furnishings and ceiling light fixture are inverted.
• The space between the Human and Demon Realms in The Owl House has two pools serving as the barriers to the different worlds facing each other with up and down swapping depending on which one you're closer to at the time. Luz ends up discovering this the hard way when she tries to reach something on the "ceiling", only for it to suddenly become the "floor" when she gets halfway there.
• One episode of Rolie Polie Olie involves the polarity of the entire Polie family being reversed after one of Mr. Polie's inventions malfunctions, resulting in the entire family being stuck walking on the ceilings of their house for the day. The problem is solved when Billy comes by and helps repair the invention that caused it with direction from Mr. Polie.

Real Life

• Outer space. Surface gravity is dependent on the object's diameter, as well as the mass. The smaller volume mass occupies, the higher the surface gravity - culminating in black holes whose infinitely small size creates a Heavy Zone that breaks physics. Even the Earth could theoretically be turned into a black hole, though the event horizon wouldn't be very big. The moon, in particular, is a well-known Light Zone, being the only one that people have walked (bounced) on.
• In order to simulate Zero-G conditions, a type of jet affectionately referred to as the "Vomit Comet" is used. Essentially an empty transport plane with the cabin covered in padding. The pilots take the plane into a climb and then gently push the nose down, giving the passengers a short period of time where they are (seemingly) weightless. This is, of course, less a case of screwing with gravity and more a case of screwing with the way the human brain perceives movement. These aircraft have been used for such serious endeavors as training astronauts and doing a swimsuit photo shoot of Kate Upton in zero g.
• In an experiment, participants were given special glasses that would reverse the image, making everything appear to them as upside-down. Eventually, the participants' brains adjusted, and the images appeared re-reversed, thus appearing normal - but only while still wearing the glasses. Once the glasses were taken away for the second half of the experiment, the participants saw everything as upside-down again until they readjusted.
• There are attractions that consist of a rotating chamber with a curved floor, like the inner surface of a sphere. To people inside it, gravity always seems to point towards the floor, since it's actually the sum of gravity and the centrifugal force. When walking from one end of the chamber (at least when doing so slowly enough that the Coriolis effect doesn't come into play), it appears that the entire chamber inclines under one's feet, and other people appear to be walking on walls.
• This research platform emulates this trope at sea when it tips up or down.
• So-called "Mystery Houses" use optical illusions and angled walls and floors to simulate this trope.
• Certain amusement park rides, originally known as Haunted Swings, achieve the effect of making the rider feel like they've gone upside down, through a combination of a swinging chair platform and a room that rotates independently around it.

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