now playing: "The End"

The End

Genre(s): Action, puzzle, social

Credits: Commissioned by Channel 4 Education, produced by Preloaded; August 2011

Depending on your beliefs, you may call it global warming, the Final Judgment, the singularity, the zombie apocalypse, the crack in the universe—the end of the world. And while it's fun to debate these things and practice your rogue's rifle aim and produce billion-dollar 3D cinematic speculations, the fact is that we're all going to die at some point, an observation that despite its reality does not at all concern the majority of us like it should. Instead, we twitter our days away while avoiding the questions about who we really want to be and what we really want to believe.

Meanwhile, far away from the US's mass-consumerist habits, our trans-Atlantic cousins put their heads together and made a browser game to frankly discuss matters of life, death, and morality (that, of course, brilliantly entertains as well) with a similarly honest title: The End. Despite the intended teen target audience, its thoughtful, surprisingly cheese-free philosophical discussions and challenging gameplay make The End enjoyable for one's maturity level, and not necessarily age.

After you create your own prankishly postmodern avatar, The End gets right to business in the introductory credits and shows you just how the world ends. It's a meteor. And you'll only see it burning for three seconds before it burns you. Your avatar is thrown into (presumably) the underworld, where you have to deal with three Guardians placed over the realms of Body, Mind, and Spirit. Each realm contains six surrealistic, physics-grounded platform-style worlds that you must navigate to find a "Key of Knowledge." Once obtained, you can unlock one of two doors answering a question ("Should people be able to choose how they die?"), and then fight the level's boss in a tile-strategy game of Death Cards. Your answers to the in-game questions are compositely evaluated on a "Death Dial" which pairs you with a historic political, scientific, cultural, or religious figure based on your apparent mutual values. 

My quirky androgynous avatar, game stats, and death dial (apparently I'm toasting with Einstein).

As you can see, we've got a platformer-meets-(game-within-a-game)-meets-educational-meets-meta-meets-ohmygoodnesssirwe'vegotaCROSSGENREonourhands! The designers went ahead and MADE ALL THE THINGS! The world really must be ending if the most original thing we can do is cram as many unique gameplay styles as we can in a game!

A purple platform level in the Spirit realm.

But obviously, The End's cross-genre goodness is the reason it's featured today, as the most insightful and fun "educational" game you'll find. Sure, you can absolutely ignore the Death Dial and whatever classroom-y mumbo-jumbo you're not particularly into, but you can't ignore the metaphor implied when you use your "shadow" alias to traverse otherwise impassable terrain. While most games can usually be classified in multiple categories anyway (as you've seen through the previous reviews), going truly, entirely cross-genre means that not only are there visible elements of multiple playing styles, but also constructing the game's very cornerstone from the merging of whole genres. Often this results in a collection of mini games, or, even cooler, the meta-game phenomenon as illustrated in The End. In short, playing genre mix-and-match allows for layering messages, allowing players to customize their priority based on individual preferences. It means that The End discusses darkness without being dark. It educates you without teaching you: no wrong answers and no pre-defined objectives.

Themes entirely aside, The End falls into the more "serious" side of the casual games—although the game world is relatively open-ended, allowing you to complete any of the three worlds at your own pace or play a round of Death Cards at your whim, you'll likely commit at least a whole afternoon to finish just the platform levels, let alone earn all the "trophies" (creating replay value by including time trials, bonus-item collection, etc.). You can save your progress either locally by using the same computer, or virtually through a Facebook log-in (the latter option allows you to play Death Cards with connected friends or watch their Death Dial ranking). If the world ended tomorrow and the last game I ever played was The End, let's just say my life would feel a little more well-rounded, and I'd rest knowing that interesting game design isn't dead.

Next time: You WILL want to know about Monday's featured game. Because. I said so.