Genre(s): Action, abstract
Credits: 2011 by Valentin Heutte (Contrebasse_)
Awards: Third place winner in the Project Eden: Experience the Music contest
A few months ago, the people behind the Kinect “multi-sensory shooter” called Child of Eden hosted a contest on Kongregate “challeng[ing] [game developers] to electrify the senses by creating a game that synchronizes music and unique gameplay.” Hmm, a meaningful music game sounds like a great topic for transcending pixels. So I looked at the first place winner.
This Kongregate game requires the Unity3D 3.1 (or higher) plugin. It is free, and takes only a few minutes to install.
Sure it does. And my OS is probably too old for it, and when it comes to casual games of all possible things, I the player have a right to an instantaneous experience! (Also, I have been told that I am possibly lazy.)
So I played the second place guy’s game. Cool, yes, but the puzzle mechanic, conveying “notes” from point A to point B, is hardly a “unique gameplay” scheme.
So I hesitantly clicked on the third place winner: Love. Suffer me to indulge my addiction for clever wordplay, but honestly, it stole my heart. (Cue canned laughter.)
Love is a high score survival game–keep your cursor (a white square personifying your anonymous existence) as close as possible to the moving black squares without touching them (instant death). The more squares you can simultaneously attach to, the more point combos you get. Aerial electronic tones harmonize in the background as you gain points; the musical component is a nice enhancement to the game, but it’s definitely not the primary gameplay mechanic, which is most likely the reason it didn’t get any higher than 3rd place. The developer recommends taking the tutorial as a necessary step, and after playing it I would have to agree. Other than being a bit on the long side (you can’t easily skip through the instructions) it establishes the game’s philosophy: love is wonderful, it makes you literally spin around in circles; but if you get too dizzy and flop into someone, it hurts a lot.
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| "I'm in love-love!" |
Like love itself, the brainless gameplay hooks you. The changing colors, the variety of reward tones, and the randomly geometric dance of the squares themselves create an initially irresistible eye candy. But after two or so minutes, the beauty and exhilaration of it all grows monotonous. Once you hit that emotional high, your whole mood rests on just a flat baseline. Whether mere incompetent dexterity, procrastinated real-world work, or eventual boredom forces you to end your relationship roleplay with a violent slam into your partner(s), you’re given a slap on the back with a bit of cynical wiseguy advice cleverly disguised as a “playing tip.”
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| "In love, the best way to score is to take risks. Don't mistake lack of sadness for happiness." |
When simple love mode bores you, try Infidelity, which “shows how hard a game love is when you try to play it twice at the same time” (in-game text). Not only does it simulate the negative connotations we hear bounced around in politics and entertainment, but also the reality of our teenage years, when our hormones drive us from one person to the next and almost always leading to multiple people we “like” at the same time, with different degrees of affection. You cleverly control two white squares (your two different "lives") simultaneously across the appearance of two field screens that are really just a single field visually divided in half. One of the failure screen quotes points out this reality: “Don’t think that you can neatly and clearly separate what you do on one side and on the other. Both sides will just keep leaking into each other until everything collapses.”
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| Lose your sexy cool with one little square, and it's game over all around. |
Ultimately, Love is a simplistic, adorable, exhibition of absurdism, repeating and arguing the age-old question: is it really better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all, if in the end you’re still alone?
Optional food for thought that I didn’t address in the main review because I thought it was too long already: What is the metaphor behind your proximity to the other squares? Originally I had assumed it referenced degree of emotional intimacy with lovers, but could it encompass sexual relations as well? Is Love subliminally encouraging abstinence? Is it even supposed to be romantic at all? Could the other squares represent family, platonic friends, coworkers, strangers even…? Mull your thoughts over in the comments, if you will.
Next time: Welcome, delicious friends.
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