The Stack

NightSky is the latest from Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren, author of Knytt, and as with Knytt, most of the point of playing is to observe the stylish, elaborate-yet-minimalist visuals. This is a quiet game made out of silhouettes in various themes, levels with silhouettes of gears and levels with silhouettes of distant trees and so forth. A glowing glass orb navigates this environment under the player’s control.

I suppose the spherical avatar begs comparison to Within a Deep Forest, Nifflas’ previous game with a ball for a protagonist, but the gameplay reminded me a lot more of Gumboy: it’s a heavily physics-oriented game where your main activity consists of just rolling left and right and trying to get enough speed to go flying off ramps to where you want to go. It doesn’t push this as hard as Gumboy did, though. NightSky is more about variations on the theme. The default controls include a button to speed up and a button to stay put (the latter being useful for clinging to moving objects), but some levels don’t allow them, or replace them with other things: the stay-put button activates a machine, or the go-faster button reverses gravity. Some levels even disable the move-left/move-right buttons and make you navigate entirely by manipulating the environment — say, releasing a hammer to smack a sled with the orb in it, or using a pair of pinball flippers. There are orb-driven vehicles, including ornithopters. It’s just one shadow of a thing after another.

The irrelevant frame tale involves dreams, and that’s a good way to think of this game: as in a dream, you just find yourself in situations without preamble or explanation. These situations last three screens, no more and no less. If there’s a navigation puzzle that only uses two screens, you get a third one that’s pure scenery. I rather like this pointless symmetry, although I’m not sure I can explain why.

The game offers both an easy and a hard mode, the difference affecting the content of the levels but keeping them roughly the same, like the light-world/dark-world thing in Super Meat Boy. It suggests reserving hard mode for your second play-through, and I agree that this is the correct approach for this game, as the hard versions of the levels are sometimes quite frustrating, and there’s a good deal of satisfaction in just breezing through the easy versions. After the epilogue, you can unlock a final set of “slightly nonsense” levels that break the game’s carefully-crafted ambiance entirely, with brightly-colored checkerboard levels and levels made of ASCII art and suchlike. It’s a good way to end it. I can’t really say that the game takes itself seriously, considering the orb-driven ornithopters, but it’s arty enough that the silly bonus content helps to strike a kind of balance. Braid could have used an ending like this one.

A colleague of mine has on his desk a book titled 1001 Videogames You Must Play Before You Die. The main purpose of this book seems to be to provoke disagreement. (Why else would it, for example, list Silent Hill but not Silent Hill 2? I think that most fans of the series would agree that if you’re going to play only one of those before you die, it should be the latter.) In the course of flipping through its pages and arguing, someone noticed a listing for Intelligent Qube (aka Kurushi) and recommended it specifically to me. I had never heard of it before, but was intrigued enough to seek out a copy. Apparently, despite a loyal following, IQ didn’t sell well outside Japan. Consequently, it’s now one of those games described as “rare” and “hard to find”, although in the age of eBay all this really means is that used copies sell for more online than you’d expect of a Playstation game from 1997.

IQ is in the “puzzle game” genre, but not in the sense that I was expecting from the way it was described to me: it’s not a “Think!” game, but a “Think fast!” game. In other words, it’s in the broader school of Tetris, down to the inexorable descent of groups of blocks that you have to deal with before they reach the bottom, except that, this being designed for the Playstation, it’s all in 3D and instead of falling downward, the blocks are coming at you.

Also unlike the usual sort of falling-block game, you play it from the inside, kind of like the Royal Puzzle from Zork III: you control a little man who runs around trying not to get steamrolled by the blocks. Getting run over doesn’t end the game, but it does prevent you from taking any more actions until the current wave of blocks has completed its journey, and that’s often enough to make losing inevitable. As such, getting run over always feels like a cheap shot. The movement of the blocks isn’t constant in this game: they take discrete steps, rolling from face to face like in Edge, and they often pause for a little while to give you a chance to do something. But sometimes they don’t pause as long as you think they’re going to. Presumably there are rules governing this, but I have yet to figure them out.

And what does your little man run around doing? Setting traps! Pressing the X button sets a blue marker on the floor tile you’re currently standing on; pressing it again detonates it, destroying any block currently on that spot. This is a big source of confusion during panicked moments: losing track of whether you’ve pressed that button an odd or even number of times. There are three sorts of blocks. First, there are the normal ones that you want to destroy before they reach the end of the track. Then there are “advantage” blocks that leave green marks behind when destroyed, which you can detonate at the press of another button, either immediately or after letting the blocks advance more, destroying any blocks in a 3×3 area. (But not your avatar, fortunately.) Finally, there are the “forbidden” ones, which you aren’t supposed to destroy. The punishment for making mistakes is always the same: the playfield is shortened by one row, making the game harder, and ending the game if you’re standing on the row that got deleted. But you can miss several normal blocks before this happens (there’s a counter on the screen keeping track of how close you are to this penalty), whereas deleting a forbidden block always incurs the penalty immediately. Thus, avoiding deleting forbidden blocks is more urgent than getting all of the normal ones — although if you can do both, clearing a wave perfectly, the reward is that the playfield lengthens by one row, giving you a little extra breathing room. Thus, this is very much a positive-feedback game: the reward for doing well is that it becomes easier to continue doing well, the punishment for doing badly is that it becomes harder. This too is very Tetris-like, but the dynamic is different: where Tetris starts off feeling easy and turns desperate once you’ve crossed a certain threshold, I felt like the tipping point in each level of IQ was the point where I acquired enough skill to stop failing.

As the levels advance and the difficulty increases (mainly by increasing the number of blocks in each wave), the game becomes all about planning out when to use the advantage blocks. You want to use them when they won’t catch any forbidden blocks, and that takes some planning. Just about the worst thing you can do is have two green-marked tiles in inopportune positions relative to each other, because you can’t detonate them individually. I’ve generally tried to avoid this by destroying the advantage blocks one by one, but this means taking more time and letting the blocks get uncomfortably close to the end of the track, and possibly even trapping your little man behind a fence of forbidden blocks. For as the waves grow larger, the game takes on aspects of a maze game, with the forbidden blocks defining where you can go, unless you accept the penalty and blast one.

In short, there is a substantial amount of gameplay here, and I’m more satisfied with the game now than I was when I first realized that there was such a strong time element, although I’m not convinced that the experience is worth what I paid for it. I have by now completed the game by dint of copious use of the continue feature, which starts you over from the start of the current level. This took two sessions, although I probably would have continued playing in my first if I had realized that the game doesn’t save your progress at all. I was fooled by a “save” option in the “options” menu, which I think just saves the high score list. It’s the arcade sensibility, really. The whole thing is meant to be played in a single session, using multiple quarters.

So, why is this a game that You Must Play Before You Die? If I recall correctly, the writeup in that book was mostly impressed with the feel of the thing, that unlike most Tetris-influenced puzzle games, it felt like it “mattered”. And, having played it, I now think this mostly has to do with the music. The game has a stirring, epic soundtrack, like John Williams movie score.

As expected, I finished Edge last night, even to the point of picking up all the crumbs in the game. (They’re actually called “prisms” by the game, which I suppose is accurate: geometrically speaking, cubes are prisms. But I’ll continue to call them crumbs.)

If this game has one really memorable gimmick, it’s the way it exploits the ambiguity of isometric perspective. Without the depth cues provided by perspective, two objects that look like they’re next to each other could be separated by any distance in the direction perpendicular to the screen. If those two objects are floor tiles, it can look like a continuous navigable surface when it’s not. There’s one fairly advanced level that appears identical to the simple tutorial-like level 1, but is actually completely different. Fortunately, the game provides a mini-map in one corner that shows a schematic of the actual level geometry around you. Without this, some bits would be absolutely hopeless, particularly the occasional level containing secret crumbs in places that are completely occluded from view. But it’s not something you’re looking at all the time. I had to keep reminding myself to look at the mini-map occasionally, in case there was some revelation to be found there.

Also significant: unintuitive limitations on movement. Your avatar is a cube that moves by rolling without slipping from one face to another. The usual way to climb is simply to roll up onto an adjacent block; this is why you can only climb walls that are one cube-unit in height. The thing is, it actually enforces the physical consequences: if you’re in a trench, for example, with walls directly to your left and right, it’s impossible to climb out, and you have no option to roll along the trench lengthwise. I found it was easy to overestimate what was impossible, and thereby miss ways to get places. There’s generally an obvious approach, but you can miss out on crumbs or simpler approaches this way, possibly things that would shave seconds off your level-completion time if you care about that.

Now, I mentioned that there was a particularly difficult move, apparently called “edging”, where you start to roll up a vertical surface, but arrest your motion by supplying just enough force to keep from falling. (Usually this is done as a way to hitch a ride on a moving object, but it’s also a way to stay put on a precipice while you wait for a moving floor tile to position itself under you.) I’ve discovered the secret to executing this, by the way: switch the controls to virtual-gamepad mode, and all it takes is a particular rhythmic tapping on the virtual button. But the reason I bring it up is because of one particular level that illustrates everything I’ve said so far: level 18, “edge time”. (The game only uses lower-case letters.) This is a level based mostly around increasingly-difficult acts of edging — or so it seems at first. But if you explore, and look at the mini-map, and think about how the grooved areas can really be navigated, you can get through it without any edging at all. When you first encounter this level, it functions as a tutorial on a difficult technique that you’ll need later. But to a sharper inspection, it’s an exercise in doing things the non-obvious way. Now, there are definitely crumbs in the game that can only be reached by feats of edging, but this level makes me wonder if there are other places where there are alternative routes that I missed. I’ve mastered the game enough to eat every crumb, but not enough to get high speed ratings, and this sort of inquiry might be crucial to that sort of achievement.

Which, however, doesn’t make speed play more appealing to me. If this game has more secrets, they’ll probably remain unfound by me.

More iOS gaming on the bus today while I contemplate what, if anything, to do about my repeated inability to run PC games without crashing. Today, I try out Edge, a game that I probably wouldn’t have heard of without Tim Langdell‘s attempt to suppress it. Langdell is so loathed in the games industry that I’d like to say that I relished giving money to his competitors, but as Mobigame (the makers of Edge) is an actual game company, they can’t really be said to be in competition with Edge Games, just as First National Bank wasn’t a competitor of John Dillinger.

But about the game! Edge is essentially a simple isometric platformer in a retroesque style: it’s all monochrome cubes, except for the player avatar and the crumbs you’re supposed to eat along the way, both of which are cubes that cycle through pastel hues in a pulsing, Atari 2600 way. Challenge is created mainly by moving elements, either cycling or triggered: cubes that threaten to knock you off platforms, cubes that you have to ride on top of, and, trickiest of all, cubes that you have to cling to by an edge in a diagonal posture without letting your angle decay or resisting the decay too hard and pivoting to the top and slamming into a wall and falling down. The last is something I still find very difficult, regardless of what control scheme I use.

Now, about those control schemes. There are three, and they’re all awkward, but they’re awkward in different ways. By default, you have a touch-and-drag interface where the relative movement of your finger is turned into a directional force. This is awkward mainly because of the mismatch between analog, any-direction finger movements and four-direction, discrete-steps cube-rolling, but also partly due to the limited space available to drag your finger around. Even on an iPad screen, I find myself sometimes running off the edge. Alternately, you can switch on a four-button directional virtual gamepad, which at least links the discrete directions to discrete inputs, but has the problem that it’s easy to lose track of where it is while your eyes are fixed elsewhere. Finally, there’s an accelerometer-based tilt-to-move system, about which the less said the better. Edge has recently been ported to PC, and it seems like pretty much any PC-based control scheme would be easier to use than what we’ve got here on its native platform. (Sort of like Machinarium in the opposite direction.) But then, making it easy may not be the point.

Also possibly missing the point: playing it for an hour at a time, like I’ve been doing. It’s a phone game, hence it is made for quick bursts, not obsessive play. I’ll probably finish it tonight.

Last night, I was tired, and not in the mood for anything stressful or taxing. Going back to Super Meat Boy, or even to the lesser challenge of Heroes Chronicles, was out of the question. So I turned to my largish sub-stack of things bought in recent Steam sales that I haven’t even tried yet.

The first thing I tried was Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure. I suppose it says something about me that a puzzle game — yea, a self-proclaimed ultimate puzzle game — is my idea of something neither stressful nor taxing. But I had every reason to believe that this would be essentially just a gallery of soup cans, where the scope of every puzzle is well-defined and there’s no possibility of negative consequences. After all, that’s what the original Safecracker was. I could be wrong; I realize that it’s not the same game. But I didn’t at first. It was many months after S:TUPA was added to Steam that a discussion in a completely different context (roughly “This is just like that puzzle in Safecracker!” “What? I’ve played Safecracker and I don’t remember any puzzle like this.”) made me aware that it was a sequel. I think understand why the makers decided to obscure this: if it were called Safecracker II, there would be potential customers who would decide not to play it because they hadn’t played the original, or who decided to play the original first and found it so off-putting that they never bought the second. But the title they chose almost kept me from buying it, and I’m their target audience. There must be some better compromise.

At any rate, I couldn’t get S:TUPA going at all on my system. Starting it just locked my machine up with no video output. Possibly it was defaulting to a resolution that my monitor doesn’t support, but even then, you’d think I’d get some background music or something. I have seen this game running on a modern system, though, so it’s probably a solvable problem. But it wasn’t the sort of puzzle I was in the mood for, so I switched games.

Next up, I tried The Ball, a first-person puzzler, which is to say, a game that owes a great deal to Portal, even though the theme here is Aztec ruins (with hints of Ancient Astronaut) rather than sterile white corridors. The main conceit is obstacles that can only be overcome by using a large, unwieldy metal ball, a unique item doesn’t necessarily easily go where it’s needed. Your main control over it is a handheld device that’s something like a ball-specific version of the gravity gun from Half-Life 2: you can use it to attract the ball when it’s in range, and also to smack it like a pinball and send it careening forward. Maybe I was doing things suboptimally, but I found that I used the attract mode to move the ball around most of the time, which means that the ball spent a lot of time right in my face, which is always awkward in a first-person game. The designers understand the problem, and compensate for it by making the ball go transparent when it blocks your view significantly, leaving only some bands solid. I felt that even this cluttered the view uncomfortably.

When I started the game, I noticed that Steam listed some “Last played” data, which struck me as strange, because I had never actually played it before. But then I remembered that I had attempted to play it back when I first bought it, only to have it crash immediately. This time, I fared better: it lasted about a half an hour before crashing, long enough for me to get not quite all the way through the first level. Since this level is pretty tutorial-like, I still don’t think I really have a good idea of what the gameplay is like or how hard the puzzles are.

With that, I gave up on puzzle games and tried out Lego Batman, something that had struck me as a good idea back in 1997 when I played Lego Star Wars. After an overlong intro sequence involving some rather forced slapstick — perhaps my tastes have changed in the last four years? — I made Lego Batman run around and hit people for a few minutes, just long enough to decide that this is a game best controlled with a gamepad rather than mouse and keboard. But my system wouldn’t recognize my trusty DualShock + USB Adapter until I rebooted, and after that, it wouldn’t start the game again. It kept throwing up Windows “illegal operation” dialogs.

It’s likely that all these problems, and probably other recent problems as well (like my difficulties with Arthur’s Knights), have a common root in my hardware, probably that the fan on the video card is clogged with dust again or something similarly foolish. But I didn’t feel like doing anything as stressful and taxing as troubleshooting hardware, so I spent the rest of the evening watching a movie instead. At least I can scratch two of the three games off the list of things I’ve purchased but not actually played.

Popping back one stack frame, I got some more Super Meat Boy in yesterday. Can I just mention how catchy the music is in this game? Half the reason I came back to it just now is that it kept going through my head even as I was playing Machinarium. The game has three versions of most tunes: a clear-toned and bouncy one for the light world, a variation with more crunchy distortion for the dark world, and a chiptune version for the retro warp zones.

But I haven’t been hearing much of those in my latest sessions. I’ve been spending nearly all of my time in the world called The End, where the light-world music is less bouncy and more mock-epic, the dark world is extremely hard to access, and there don’t seem to be any warp zones. Possibly there are some lurking somewhere, but I suspect not, simply because this is the section that strips away all the distractions and just leaves pure challenge. There are no bandages to collect. You can’t even use any of your unlocked characters; apparently confronting Doctor Fetus is something Meat Boy has to do for himself. And, perhaps unintuitively, that’s what’s driven me to play only in The End. From the standpoint of making progress, the chief reason to go back to earlier levels (including dark world levels) is to unlock additional characters who can help you along. If they can’t help me any more, I might as well keep banging my head on level 6-5.

That’s where I am now, level 6-5. It’s the last level before the boss fight, and the only one I need to complete to unlock it. Its name is Omega, and I have just spent a great deal of time on it. It consists of five loosely-defined floating rectangular structures, bristling with buzzsaws, mostly navigable only by long-distance wall-jumps executed in specific places with split-second precision. Just getting into the first enclosed structure seemed impossibly hard when I started. By now, I’ve actually got to where I can see the level’s end a couple of times, but it’s clear that I’ll have to play for hours more before I can actually finish.

The thing is, I’m reluctant to stop playing again now. I’ve made a lot of progress on completing Omega, but it’s not permanent, tangible progress. It’s progress in the form of knowledge and muscle memory — “controller kata”, as an acquaintance of mine described it — and if I spend a week playing something else, there’s a good chance I’ll lose it. This is not stuff you can write down, for the most part. It’s about getting the right rhythm, and applying it without visual confirmation, like Tommy playing pinball. Dustin Hoffman’s character in Little Big Man, during his gunslinger phase, spoke of “firing a gun without touching it”, by which he seemed to mean performing the action so automatically that you aren’t aware of the weight of the gun in your hand until afterward. That’s more or less how I now feel about the earlier actions in this level. The repetition becomes a kind of meditation.

Except that, even in this state, I’m not executing perfectly — in fact, I’m executing so imperfectly that I only occasionally reach the point near the end that I don’t actually know how to execute. Oh, I manage each particular bit on most attempts at it, but the probabilities multiply out to majority failure. It makes me wonder to what degree meditation exercises of the purely mental sort are subject to error and variation that the meditator doesn’t notice because there’s no machine judging correctness and making you start over.

I said that I’d finish Machinarium on the PC rather than the iPad, but it turns out I was wrong. I can blame my lengthy bus commute, but that’s only part of it. Despite what I said before, it turns out that the touchscreen version of the interface is easier to use in some situations, particularly when you’re pressing on-screen buttons repeatedly. With a touchscreen, you can hold one finger over each button, essentially treating the screen like a keyboard. With a mouse, and without the hotkeys that usually accompany button-based interfaces in PC apps, you have to keep looking back at the buttons to reposition the cursor over the one you want, and that means briefly looking away from whatever the button affects. This is particularly bad in action sequences.

Action sequences? Yes, there are a few, adaptations of old videogames. I’ve already described one: the shooter that grants access to the hints. In addition, there’s a simplified Space Invaders at one point, and, towards the end, a maze-based shooter in a style that reminded me a lot of Atari 2600 Adventure (even if the gameplay was more like Berserk). The context for the Space Invaders is simply an arcade, but the maze game seems to be about cleaning up the software corruption left behind by the bad guys in the mind of the big-headed robot in the city’s central tower.

The bad guys in question are a small band of criminals in black hats who are seen stealing things and even planting a bomb throughout and before the game. Josef recognizes them: they’re responsible, it turns out, for his condition at the beginning of the game, in pieces in a scrapyard, and also show up in a few little flashbacks where Josef remembers when they were mere schoolyard bullies, shaking him down for pocket change and knocking him off the jungle gym, thereby justifying any horrible thing Josef might do to him in return.

Which, of course, provokes the question of whether, and why, robots need to go to school, but the rule of this game is that robots can engage in any sort of human behavior if it’s funny or makes for a decent puzzle. A couple of scenes have toilets in them. An early scene in a jail cell has a cellmate who wants a cigarette, although I suppose that in a sense it makes more sense for robots to smoke than for people to do so. One of the bad guys’ nefarious deeds was to kidnap Josef’s girlfriend and force her to work in the kitchen of a sleazy bar, raising the question of why a robot needs a kitchen, although somehow the “girlfriend” part, with the implication that robots are gendered, doesn’t seem so strange. Well, our concept of gender is at least as much social as biological. Presumably it’s entirely social for robots.

There’s a brief bit where the player even gets to control the girlfriend, which yields one of the game’s better jokes, especially considering that it’s a repeat of a joke you’ve seen over and over by that point. One of the first things we learn about Josef is that his inventory is in his abdomen, and whenever he picks something up or takes it out to use it, he hinges his head open at the mouth like the lid of a trash can. It’s a great sight gag because it combines so many incongruities: he’s turning himself into an inanimate object, but he’s also eating something or vomiting it out, while at the same time being completely unconcerned about what it is or what it’s made of unless its physical properties affect the process of insertion or retrieval (as when he sucks in a length of hose like a child eating spaghetti). Now, one of the things that genders the girlfriend is that her face is more delicate and less machine-like than Josef’s. It would still look monstrous on a human, but relative to the other robots, she’s downright pretty. So when she handles inventory the same way — something she doesn’t even look physically capable of doing — it comes as an extra shock. But it’s also touching in a way, because it also reinforces the sense of a bond between the two of them. They’re two little robot geeks who approach the world the same way.

Also, it helps that there are flashbacks, in the form of line art in thought balloons, showing Josef and girlfriend in happier times. I’ve only seen a couple such — apparently more appear when you stand still in certain locations, which means you’re bound to see one or two over the course of the game, but not more than that unless you’re looking for them. Now that I’m done, I may do that. This strikes me as something that’s missing from most games with kidnapped-girlfriend plots: some indication of what the hero is trying to recover.

I’m pretty sure I’m nearing the end of this game. Like many adventures, it’s fairly short. And unlike Samorost, in which each room is a self-contained mini-adventure, Machinarium has a layout that returns on itself a lot and makes you revisit locations for different purposes and from different directions. One of the first locations has a bridge that you try to cross, only to slip on an oil slick and fall into the lower city; the same location appears again, from the other side of the bridge, much later on.

The puzzle content turns out to be mainly a mix of self-contained mini-games and environmental inventory-item use. There’s a little bit of combining of inventory items thrown in, but only in fairly obvious ways, and a little bit of Myst-style contraptioneering, but not nearly as much as you might expect given that the setting is all about fanciful machines. Some of the self-contained puzzles are old chestnuts, including one or two that even appeared in The Seventh Guest [EDIT: Looks like I’m wrong about that. See comments.], but others seem to be genuinely original, like when you have to find a minimal way to block the flow of water through a complicated tangle of branching pipes. I had fun with these puzzles, and didn’t get truly stuck on them once.

The environmental puzzles, on the other hand, I’ve got stuck on several times, either as a result of not noticing a clickable item or simply because the required action was one of those unpredictable ones that you need to just try rather than figure out. Fortunately, there’s an excellent in-game hint system, one I like so much that I’m actually kind of glad that I got stuck so that I could experience it properly. First, every scene has one free hint that displays, in a thought balloon from Josef, a picture of your ultimate goal for that scene. It’s a bit like the high-level course correction that some text adventures provide in response to the command “help” or “think”. This has never really been enough for me when I’ve resorted to hints, but I appreciate that it’s there, because if I actually had been so off-base in my thinking that all I needed was a statement of intent to put me right (as has happened in other games), I wouldn’t want or need anything more detailed. Second, you can access a more detailed depiction of every action you have to take in your current room. This is the part that I described as being “in comics form” in my last post, but let me describe it more fully now: it’s in the form of an opened book, with line drawings on the right-hand page while the left-hand page is filled with text in a made-up alphabet and perhaps an explanatory illustration that you can puzzle out the significance of, kind of like the Codex Seraphinianus. The panels depicting the actions, too, require a certain amount of interpretation — even though they’re illustrations, you have to read them — and they leave out any steps that have to be performed in a different room, such as picking up inventory items. While the absence of a particular action you were expecting in the hints for your current room can itself be a significant clue, the fact that it’s left out helps it to feel like you’re figuring out the last steps yourself instead of just following directions. This sense is further helped by the way you access the full hints: by playing a mini-game, a crude scrolling shooter with Gameboy-style graphics in which you guide a key through spider-infested tunnels to a waiting keyhole. It’s not an engaging enough activity that I’d ever choose it when I’m not stuck, but it puts a speed bump on the process of getting hints, makes them non-free in a way that I think works better than rationing out hint tokens or whatever. It’s not too difficult once you’ve worked out how to work it, but can still take me three or four tries to get through, and that’s enough to make me feel like I’m not cheating. I earned those hints.

In my weekend Super Meat Boy session, I unlocked a new playable character: Josef, the protagonist of Machinarium, a game that, coincidentally, was recently ported to the iPad. Taking this as a cue to finally play the thing, which has been languishing on the Stack ever since its inclusion in a Humble Indie Bundle, I have now gotten a taste of both the PC and iPad versions.

Machinarium was created by the same team as Samorost and its sequel, and has something of the same feel. It’s a more coherent world, both logically and artistically, and more like a conventional point-and-click adventure, with an inventory, and an avatar whose actions you control and who goes where you click (although only approximately: it’s more like he has a set of fixed positions that he can move between, but the UI presents it as if it were classic Sierra/Lucasarts-style navigation). But it has something of the sensibilities of a twitch-and-wiggle game, where you seldom know at first what a given click will bring. Even the splash screen emphasized this: the very first thing you see in the game is the title drawn in thick letters with a scribbly fill (anticipating the illustrative style used throughout), which warp and morph when the cursor passes over them.

Our cleverer readers may now be wondering how they manage that on the iPad, which doesn’t have a cursor in the same sense as the PC. The answer is that they don’t. The iPad version skips the splash screen entirely. This is just one of several small ways in which the PC version is superior.  The lack of a persistent cursor on the touchscreen means that there’s less feedback about what’s clickable; the game shows a cursor briefly when you tap things, but you lose the passive feedback. There are a few places where the iOS version compensates for this by superimposing arrows on the screen to indicate actions you might otherwise miss (which is particularly important in timed sequences), but this is an inelegant solution. I suppose that for some people the convenience of portability, or even just love of Apple, will counterbalance these deficiencies, but I intend to finish the game with a mouse, even though I’m farther along on the iPad at this point.

Now, I said that the protagonist is named Josef, but I have to take Ed McMillen’s word for this, because, like Samorost, the game itself is completely wordless (apart from a few early tooltips that instruct the player in basic controls). Even the hints are wordless, showing rather than telling the actions you must take, in comics form. Talking with other characters yields voice-like squeals and gibberish, often accompanied by a cartoon-style speech balloon bearing a picture of what that character wants from you. In typical adventure-game fashion, this usually means a sub-goal you need to achieve to get what you want from them, but there’s at least one case where it’s a complete red herring. I think the use of pictures instead of words made this particularly unexpected: how could I doubt the existence of an item I had seen?

Josef is a robot, as are all the inhabitants of the city where the game takes place, including the animals. (Possibly the city itself is called Machinarium? As with Josef’s name, this is unclear from the game content.) It’s a ramshackle place and the robots all seem old and dented and in need of a good cleaning and oiling, badly repaired or perhaps just awkwardly designed. But it’s a graceful sort of awkwardness. Josef himself frequently displays a machine’s imperviousness to discomfort, for example allowing himself to go stiff, tip over, and fall from a ladder instead of going to the effort of climbing down. In effect, he temporarily becomes an inanimate object during this animation. A city of robots is a place where the distinction between the animate and the inanimate is not rigid, and that cuts both ways: any machine can become a character, with its own motivations and opinions. It’s a bit like what Syberia was trying to do, but to a greater extreme and with more of a sense of humor.

I recently saw a couple of writeups from different sources about a Flash-based game called Hollow, a short, difficult platformer that really made me think that its author admires Edmud McMillen: the player character reminded me a lot of the bobble-headed monsters from Gish, and the whole style of extremely difficult platforming with minimal downtime on death owes a lot to Super Meat Boy. And, once Super Meat Boy was in my mind, I had the urge to give it another whirl.

I said before that world 4, the “Hell” world, seemed to be beyond my abilities, but now, I’ve not only got through it, I’ve passed the world after it as well. Perhaps Hollow helped to get me into the right mindset. The thing about these levels is that, however impossible they look at first, they do yield to persistence and practice. After trying and failing enough, the trickiest jump sequence becomes temporarily easy, the necessary moves burned into short-term muscle memory. The one real challenge, then, is convincing yourself to spend enough time replaying a given level to beat it — and it’s much easier for me to do this in a shorter game.

It seems like the boss levels are getting easier at this point. The first three worlds all had some kind of time pressure in their boss fights — in particular, world 3 ended in a race against time instead of a conventional boss. But there doesn’t seem to be any time factor at all in world 5, and in Hell, time is actually on your side: the boss fight is a survival challenge, where all you have to do is stay alive long enough for the massive but idiotic opponent to brain himself via repeated failed attempts at head-butting.

The boss fight in Hell is worth special note because it’s one of the few places where a platformer acknowledges the hideousness consequent on taking the action literally. The boss, apparently named “Little Horn”, is a colossal Meat Boy formed from hundreds of Meat Boy’s former lives. In the cutscene that introduces the fight, we see dead Meat Boys raining down into Hell, visibly disturbing the living Meat Boy as he grasps what they are and just as quickly suppresses this knowledge. Now, usually in platformers there’s an unspoken assumption that, when you die, everything since the last checkpoint unhappens. But this isn’t the first suggestion that this isn’t the case here. Meat Boy leaves red stains on everything he touches, and those remain in place from life to life. (Sometimes I even use the stains as guides to help me repeat actions precisely.) When there’s an explosive hazard, sometimes one life’s spatter of blood is still airborne when the next life starts. But such things fade from the attention, until the game feeds us a cutscene that reminds us of them.

Thinking about it mythically, journeys through Hell are all about conquering death. Thus, it’s fitting for Meat Boy to encounter and defeat here a creature literally formed from his own numerous deaths. The symbolism gets a little weird when you consider that meat is, by definition, something that’s already dead, but this can be taken as showing how complete his mastery of his own mortality is — an interpretation made stronger by the self-destructive behavior the game provokes, accidentally leaping headlong into circular saws and not caring much. Meanwhile, the chief antagonist is Dr. Fetus, someone who hasn’t even been born yet. So far from mastering death, he hasn’t even gotten started at mastering life. No wonder he resents Meat Boy so much.

If I read the art correctly, dead Meat Boys continue to be a menace in the next world, where zombie versions of yourself pursue you. World 5 is actually unusually dense with active enemies of various kinds (counting guided missiles), considering that the world is titled “Rapture” and it’s set in the aftermath of a nuclear detonation. All this seems to go away in world 6, “The End”, which goes back to basics: just player versus environment, with circular saws on tracks or swing-arms as the only moving elements other than the player character. The End has only five levels before the boss fight, but they’re so preposterously difficult that I haven’t got through them yet. Furthermore, it should be noted that The End is actually the second-to-last level, and also that there’s a whole mechanic concerning “light” and “dark” versions of every level, where the light version is what you get by default, and the dark version has to be unlocked by beating a certain time to get an “A+” rating on the light version. (There are no other ratings. You get an A+ or nothing.) Steam has two separate Achievements: “The End”, for beating the light world, and “The Real End” for beating the dark world. I think I’ll probably only be going for the fake end, but we’ll see how I feel after I’ve reached it.