As a title, "Flipnic" is just about as weak as they come. It sounds like a pancake breakfast held under a tree in a park, with little half-used single serving packets of margarine and "golden" (i.e. not maple) syrup littered all over the grass. It sounds like the sort of event you should avoid, even when it is held in a politician's honour and that policitian is your Mom.

Lucky for us all that in real life Flipnic does not involve syrup of any kind. It is a pinball game that stretches its legs a lot. It moves pinball out of arcade tables and into rivers and waterfalls. It moves pinball into shiny metallic tunnels of gleaming modernism. It moves pinball into worlds of glass and lasers. It pushes pinball so hard it snaps back on itself, becoming a blippy 2D game of pure abstract shapes, rendered in the chunky style of circa-1983 arcade computer graphics. Flipnic tries very, very hard, and mostly it succeeds.

The opening level is called "Biology." We begin with a shiny steel ball and a set of flippers built into the rocky banks of a river. Apparently our game is going to take place on a set of rapids. We decide that is a pretty good idea and flap one of the flippers to start the action. The ball drops toward the pit at the bottom of the screen, rolling in a perfect parabolic curve that tells us the game's designers care deeply about authentic physics.

We knock it to safety with one of our flippers. It rattles through a thicket of bumpers, making satisfying ringy noises with each collision. We gently nudge the shoulder buttons on the controller to tap the world a bit to the left or a bit to the right, keeping the cascade of bumps and points going a little longer than mere luck would have allowed. The vibe is authentic. We feel deeply satisfied. Despite the river and the rocks, this is real pinball.

Then we accidentally knock the ball onto a rail that extends off to one side, and watch helplessly as our ball rolls right out of the river and into the sky and over a cliff, dropping in a collection of shallow ponds inhabited by many colourful flowers and a small family of hippos. Here, too, flippers are part of the landscape, and here, too, they respond to our buttonwork, so we decide to save our exclamations of amazement for later and instead worry about keeping the ball alive.

In time, we realize that we are playing not on a pinball table or even a set of pinball tables, but on a small country. We can knock our ball up a cliff face, and suddenly our perspective will shift 90 degrees, and we will find ourselves playing on a wall as if it were a tabletop and gravity had changed directions. The physics, we come to understand, is highly realistic but also highly flaky.

There are other small countries here beyond "Biology." "Metallurgy" is all sleek and grey and futuristic. "Optics" is shimmeringly colourful and radiant. And then, when we are just getting the hang of things, along comes "Geometry," which looks and feels like an undiscovered relic from the 8-bit era.

"Geometry" is the highlight of the package, going beyond pinball to offer use a wholly new experience of colour and shape and movement. The flippers go away, replaced by rectangular paddle-bats like the ones from Pong. Our job is to knock our ball (which is now a simple white disc) into coloured bricks, and to know our ball through doorways, and to direct our ball through collections of arrows in the correct order, and to keep our ball away from a glowing red line, which brings certain death.

We have never seen or touched anything like "Geometry," but somehow, it remains completely of a piece with the 3D areas that precede it. It is pure abstraction with a faint dusting of the pinball aesthetic, and it is delicious.

The music in "Geometry" is super annoying. You will love it.