now playing: "Don't Look Back"

AKA, What Game Not to Play When You're Really Dazed Out on a Saturday Night.

Don't Look Back (Terry Cavanagh, 2009) already has a pretty ominous sounding name, and so when I'm playing it I get rather easily freaked out by the lack of any kind of soundtrack besides the grunting pixels of snakes, spiders, bats, jellyfish thingies, and other really weird thingies hunting me down. Not to mention, it's ALL pixels. The effect of which provides me a rather discomforting feeling of retroness that reminds me of too many hours spent going nowhere in Pitfall! And in Don't Look Back, there is no room to get stressed out about stuff.

The Angry Squiggles with Saw Teeth that I've seen in other games makes more than one appearance here.

Furthermore, everything is red and black and some pink, but it's not a pretty pink. Kind of sick. Like tongue-colored. Makes me think of death and stuff. Blegh. While the keyboard controls are relatively straightforward, they can be very confuzzling to manipulate when it's a late Saturday night and you are already emotionally and physically drained. It's described as a "challenging" platformer, and it's not used lightly. Jumps must be timed just right, the gun must be used simultaneously and at the same time, walking steps must be perfectly incorporated--frankly, it was all a bit much to overwhelm my poor head with at the moment. So much, in fact, that I almost missed the entire point of the game (which of course, when it's a game on Transcending Pixels, is anything but the obvious).

Did I mention that you start out the game's menu screen standing in a raining graveyard? It's a very important detail that you should really keep in mind as you're playing. If you get too wrapped up in the intense action like I did, you'll miss the point. I'm not really sure how to break this to you without giving you a complete spoiler of the game's ending--but let me just say that ultimately, you'll wonder why you bothered playing it at all. You will literally wish that you didn't look back. Because in the end, you just end up looping back around--not exactly retracing your treacherous path, which makes doubling back is a lot easier--and you have to ask yourself, why.

Why take a circuitous path around then? Why go on the journey at all?

Oddly enough, playing this game reminded me a lot of something that arose between a (unfortunately former) friend of mine and myself. It took me weeks to accept that no, nothing I could do could make us friends again, just at the snap of a finger. I couldn't say anything or do anything to make him understand how apologetic I felt or how my intentions were good. He had his mind made up. But it didn't stop me from trying, even though in the back of my head I realized I was on a dead-end road.

So what was the point in dwelling on it? Catharsis is one possible answer. Maybe there's something to be gained by relishing the hurt. But I think that there's something else that we go through when we lose someone. It's not enough to just lose them physically, having them be swept out of our lives--we have to lose them in our heads and in our hearts too. And it's that process that this unusual pixellated title attempts to capture, and it does so super effectively.

You'll enjoy Don't Look Back for its action-oriented value, undoubtedly. But there's been a lot of philosophical discussion surrounding this piece as well. I'm just here to get you started--and to remind you that you should not do a lot of heavy thinking late on a Saturday night.

And everything is black at one point. Just blackness. That should have tipped me off to something, but it didn't. I kept trudging forward, blindly. Literally.