now playing: "This is the Only Level"

This is the Only Level

Genre(s): Action, puzzle, weird/unknown

Credits: Armor Games, 2009

Thanks to ofmyinsanity for recommending this game for review!

White elephant gifts. Avoiding the elephant in the room. Elephants never forget... "unless it's the rest of the levels" (in-game text), according to yet another of Armor Games's studio-produced titles called This is the Only Level. Why they have a history of picking elephants as their PC subjects is unknown to me, although I speculate there is likely an inside joke involved. In short, they do it for comical, ridiculous, and thatmagicword ABSURD reasons. Cue the lengthy, existentialist, Camus-quoted dissertation! 

Actually though, I've already written it in my review on Obey the Game, so I won't serve you Christmas cookies in July and simply customize the rephrasing for the sake of this particular piece. This is the Only Level certainly repeats those themes and not without its own reasons. But I chose this title for another reason. It has only one level. 

Oh, you knew that already? Or so you thought.

The goal: navigate the elephant from the starting tunnel to the ending tunnel. Don't touch the spikes, and press the red button to get past the green wall blocking the end tunnel. At least, this is what happens on the first level, of the first level. (The game calls the secondary levels "stages" to avoid confusing players, but I like saying "levels" twice because a lack of differentiation is, in my opinion, the most significant aspect of this title.) You will play this first level 30 times and experience something different each time.

The third level of the first level, which looks exactly the same as all other 29 levels of the first level. But in this level, pressing the button will flick the guard wall up, rather than granting passage as it normally does.

Put simply, This is the Only Level is an imaginative exercise in not only outside-the-box puzzle solving, but in outside-the-box gameplay design. Each secondary level, configured with the same spatial layout and destination goal, requires additional player insight to solve a "catch" within the gameplay, hinted in each level's title. From simply scrambling the arrow-key controls, to varying the gravitational pull, to eliminating all "jump" movements outright, the designers remind me of students building a project on the day before it's due and going absolutely bananas with the first ideas they think of. ("Alternating stripes of death? Sounds good to me, dude.") At one point you're absolutely required to visit the game's credits page in order to pass (the best example I've seen of clever, shameless self-promotion yet). The puzzles themselves are nothing a ten-year-old couldn't solve, but when you find the solution you experience a definite "huh" moment as you find yourself naturally trying to "think like a designer" and wondering how they, the people behind the curtain, could harvest so many unique perspectives on the same concept.

It is true that the Armor Games's "elephant originals" are by far the worst offenders for creating black holes of time-wasting productivity-sucking goodness in my casual game perusals. But it is also true that despite its outrageous, mindless premise, This is the Only Level is a successful experiment in creative-thinking diversion.

Friday preview: Game designer dad + five-year-old daughter + 72 hours to make a game = priceless.