I Play Games: A Luxorious Walk

 

A Luxurious Walk a game by Ducky Elford in Voidspace

I’m bad at platforming games. I don’t have the reflexes and I never got the experience with them when I was young. Precision timing isn’t really my thing. Still that’s hardly a concern with this game, which stutters and stops, throwing you off. It blares discordant sounds, flashes static on the screen distractingly. It’s hard, not because you need to get it exactly right, but because it has hidden pitfalls randomly in your way. There are coins to pick up, and they turn the £ score from 0 to wildly fluctuating symbols.

The game is about how being poor, unqualified, in a dead-end situation, makes it impossible to make any progress. How everything is depressing. How the slightest mis-step can throw you down a hole, and even if you do everything right then you’re screwed. How even a walk is a luxury.

So, job done.

We play as the cat, a sweet and tiny creature who has been neglecting the narrator. The cat can take a walk (though the narrator hates to be alone). Yet the cat has the same pitfalls.

I can’t get past level 3, where it stops being a one button platformer and you are attacked by emails (envelopes with wings) you have to swat out the air with your cat paw. I keep thinking of new ways to try and get past it, but when I try, I fail. I don’t know if there’s something obvious I’m missing or if the process just relies on doing exactly the right thing at the right time. It’s opaque.

Losing at this stage has us being told we’ve failed to get a job above our grade. Good work at matching theme and gameplay again.

I was asked to review this, so I approached it as a piece of work. Something to stoically make my way through. That was dispiriting so I reframed it. I chose to do this. This is worthwhile in it’s own right. I’m playing this game to find out what it is, and the review is just one of the results of the endeavour. It didn’t make it easier to play.

For various reasons this review was not published so I am posting it here.

I keep thinking. If it didn’t glitch like this. If it didn’t make such aggravating sounds and effects. If it wasn’t so opaque in what it wanted me to do. If it didn’t spend so much time on that screen where it calls me a loser for losing. If it were just a little bit easier to make progress, to figure out what I’m supposed to do.

Yeah, here we are again. It’s an allegory.

I know how hard it is to make a game. And how much harder it is to reproduce an aesthetic, to match game to message. To do all that with the pressure of society, to be productive, to be serious, to prove yourself worthy. Everything that happens in a game is deliberate (and even if it isn’t, yes it is) so I understand what’s going on here. This is a lesson that would not sink in if it were easier, if it were explained.

Still, maybe a hint on what I’ve done wrong?

Play This: Look, I can tell you what’s going on but the only way to understand, to really accept what it’s doing is to play
Don’t Play This: It’s hard and unpleasant and you know what that’s like already without grinding away at this for a few hours to get nowhere