Reviews: They Bleed Pixels and Thirty Flights of Loving (PC)

MOAR reviews...MOAR!!!

They Bleed Pixels
They Bleed Pixels is unsatisfying in the way a bad ice cream sandwich is unsatisfying: while you'd certainly hoped for more, you've still gotten to eat an ice cream sandwich and so you're not going to complain. Too much.

NOW 30% MORE OF A DISAPPOINTMENT! SORT OF!

I think in reality my love/hate relationship with this game might spring from a misunderstanding on my part of what it's supposed to be. I think I envisioned the game, based on the videos I'd viewed and the reviews I'd read before buying it, as a clever beat-em-up with a Lovecraftian aesthetic and the occasional bit of jumping.

This excited me because a) I love Lovecraft and b) a beat-em-up with a good fighting system is one of my greatest weaknesses, along with side-scrolling bullet-hell shooters and Serious Sam-style FPSs. I've logged an embarrassing amount of hours playing Super Double Dragon, Return of the King, and WWF No Mercy! over the years as a result of b).

Unfortunately, if you've watched the above trailer, you've already seen the entirety of the fighting-move set you're given during the game and you've only seen a very small part of the hair-tearingly infuriating jumping sequences.

Unfortunately Part Two, the game is really not that good when it's trying to be Lovecraft-meets-Super-Meat-Boy, which is what it's trying to do for about 90% of its running time. Which brings me to a more general point that I'd like to express to all indie games: SUPER MEAT BOY IS BETTER AT BEING SUPER MEAT BOY THAN YOU ARE.

And he knows it too, that cheeky little fucker.

They Bleed Pixels's controls are just too slippery; it's never quite clear when you're going to let go of a wall, or when you're about to grab one, the timing of doing combo-heavy things like juggling are imprecise, and all too often the double-jump just refuses to work for no apparent reason. Super Meat Boy isn't great because it's bastard-hard, it's great because it can kill you two hundred times on the same level and every single time you'll know it was your fault, because the controls are precise and the way through the level is clear. If you can't get there, it's because you're not good enough. TBP is different; generally, when I died multiple times in quick succession I was reduced to that old NES standby: screaming "I PRESSED THE FUCKING JUMP BUTTON! I PRESSED IT!!! AAAAAUGGGGGGGGAGHHGHHH!?" over and over while slamming the controller into my own skull.

Me playing Unreal Tournament in 1999.

Needless to say, this is unsatisfying.

The beat-em-up part of the game was pretty excellently done, but it just felt underdeveloped. For as long as the game takes to finish, you learn pretty much all of your fighting moves by the time you're about 10% through, and by then you've also met almost all of the (rather unvaried) enemy types you'll fight as well.*

What I really enjoy about a good hyper-hard platforming game is the sense of personal accountability that comes with a really tight control scheme (and the subsequent feeling of ultimate success you get when you beat the "impossible" game anyway). What I really enjoy about a good beat-em-up game is the ebb and flow, the punch and counterpunch between you and your enemies, the mini-strategy game that's set up in the instants between button presses as a result of the complexity at work underneath the obvious layer of graphical fisticuffs. TBP doesn't provide either of these experiences. It gestures emphatically enough at each of them that it was sort of fun for its entire maybe-six-hours running time, but there's not enough variation to make it very engaging beyond the level of a quick blast of dopamine.

What was really cool was the bonus levels unlocked when I finished the game: one that was a labyrinth-like tower with a better level design than anything found in the game proper, and another that used the game's juggling mechanic to task you with luring enemies into various traps located around the level. These were twists on the game's basic mechanic that I was mentally begging for throughout the main campaign. It's strange that they only emerge during the guest-designed levels. Oh well.

*I should note here that the game dutifully doles out new "tutorial" sections to you every time you finish an early level, but they're never anything you can't just figure out on your own after a few seconds of button-mashing.

Thirty Flights of Loving
Without getting into the age-old (and fairly pointless) argument of what a "game" is, I found Thirty Flights of Loving to be less of a game and more something that you'd "read" in a college-level Short Stories class. In fact, the next time I teach 21st century fiction or something similar, we're definitely going to be "playing" TFoL. It's a really incredible experience, but not a really incredible gameplay experience. It's an experiment (it seems to me) in the use of an interactive virtual space as a storytelling medium. And it succeeds brilliantly while managing to be unlike any other "game" I've ever "played."

Okay, I'll try to lay off the air quotes now.

This looks suspiciously like the last syllable of the word "beotchhhhhhhhhhhhh."

Everything about TFoL screams "literature" to me. Maybe that's because I'm an English professor and I'm always hearing someone scream "literature," even if it's usually in an anguished tone of voice while walking into or out of my classroom. But. The experience of playing through this game is the experience of reading a short story by a master author. Except it's not a written text, or even a film, but instead it's a video game. It has its own distinct visual style, for sure:

Block heads and duck feet are two features of said style.

The music is an excellent, if eccentric fit. Much like a movie, many of the scenes and set pieces are framed; that is, you as the player view them in a particular sequence from a particular angle with a particular timing, that is repeated even during second and third playthroughs. On one hand, the almost total lack of actual interactivity (other than just walking down the hallways the game presents you with) is what makes me hesitate to call this a game, but on the other hand it's the only game I've ever played that successfully integrates smash cuts and that's fucking awesome.

Also, you can peel an orange and throw it at a pretty block-headed girl.

The game plays a lot with perspective and time (and I can't say much more without RUINING EVERYTHING), and sometimes veers gleefully off what little beaten narrative path there is to indulge in what seemed to me at first to be random wackiness but later was revealed (by my own brain on a third playthrough) as wonderfully clever symbolism.

This really isn't a game to play and then criticize the mechanics, the graphics, the "fun" level, etc. There really is no gameplay and the entire experience will take you maybe 15 minutes, tops. But, like a good but cleverly complex short story, I went back right after the end and played it through again. And again. And then again with the commentary "track" enabled. And every time I teased a little bit more meaning out of it until I was able to decide what it all (or almost all, at least) meant to me, even if that wasn't the dev's intent. The entire time I was playing, I was constantly caught up in questions of authorial intent, meaning of symbolism,
existence of through-running themes, characters' motivations, etc. And not in a "this game's story sucks, so I don't know what's going on" way, but in the way the makes a post-play discussion session with a few friends or students absolutely worth having. And that's a really, really rare thing in the world of video games. It doesn't have to be, but it is. Though that's less (I think) because of the limitations or strictures of the medium and more because to have a story that works on the level(s) of TFoL you need a Hemingway, or a Faulkner, or a Borges...someone who can actually create an experience worth painstakingly parsing for shimmering little splinters of meaning. And that's what we have here. I don't think all games should be like this. I don't think many games should be like this. I don't think many games can be like this. But this one is, and it's remarkable. I'm glad it exists.

In this particular case, the cake is NOT a...well, you know.