This game simulates the feeling of forgetting to bring a bag to your grocery shopping and having to walk around with too many objects in your hands barely clinching to most of them while trying to balance the rest atop until finally you lose your finger strengh and all of them fall down on the floor, he milk glass breaking and the watermelon shattering resulting in a big mess. People stating at you while you feel like the worst person that ever lived.

The aesthethic makes this feel like a luxurious game for the noble folk. But in reality they made the most tedious game I have ever played in my life.

One of those game where im not sure if anybody has ever 100% it because the fun vs. difficulty ratio makes it really not worth it.

     'I understand people used to make lamps using ionized gases: neon, argon, mercury, and so forth. Walking down into quicksilver gully is exactly like walking into the glow of one of those old lamps.'
     – John H. Varley, Retrograde Summer, 1975.

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (16th May – 22th May, 2023).

In John Varley's Retrograde Summer (1975), the narrator goes with her clonal sister Jubilant to a grotto filled with liquid mercury. An industrial waste, this mercury is the by-product of fusion operations, crudely dumped into nature without any environmental precautions. During the summer, the mercury evaporates, forming rainbow-ionised clouds, but some of it condenses in the underground caverns, forming pools of liquid mercury. It is a popular spot for children, many of whom play on its surface, as it is impossible to sink deep into it. For Jubilant, it is a contemplative discovery. 'She watched the drops fall from the roof and splash without a ripple into the isolated pools on the floor of the cave,' comments the narrator [1]. Mercury has a mystical aura, often depicted in science fiction, but also in modernist decoration with the lava lamps of the late 1960s.

     A recreational contemplation of mercury and wooden labyrinths

A similar tranquil atmosphere can be found in Archer Maclean's Mercury, whose introductory cutscenes evoke unexplored science fiction frontiers, from Arctic glaciers to electron atmospheres. Archer Maclean, a jack-of-all-trades known for experimenting with a wide variety of game concepts – from International Karate (1986) to his snooker games – has revisited an old industry idea. Controlling a ball in three-dimensional space is a simple premise that lends itself to many variations, as evidenced by the many titles inspired by Marble Madness (1984) and Super Monkey Ball (2001). But just like Tama: Adventurous Ball in Giddy Labyrinth (1994) or 3D Marble Flip! (2003), Mercury is primarily inspired by wooden labyrinth puzzles where the ball is moved by the tilt of the toy. Unexpectedly, the development team decided to implement liquid mechanics for the ball after developing a new physics engine.

This approach gave shape to Mercury, which then took full advantage of it. Mercury's very high density, low viscosity and strong metallic bonding allow for unexpected movements. Titles that only allow the player to control incompressible balls often adopt a very linear level design; creativity comes mainly from the verticality, which allows the ball to fall in a variety of ways and take shortcuts. Mercury is much more fluid; the first level introduces the movement mechanics and shows the player how the liquid interacts with the slopes. However, the title also implies that only a fraction of the mercury needs to touch the finish line to complete the level: a creative player will realise that it is possible to send the molten mass against the corner of the raised platform and let inertia cut off some of the mercury, which can be sent directly to the end of the level. Splitting the liquid or flattening it against the walls are viable strategies for progressing through the game, sometimes circumventing puzzles in seemingly unexpected ways.

     Physical creativity of objectives

With this free-form philosophy, Mercury offers three different types of objectives. 'Races' involve reaching the end of the level as quickly as possible, regardless of the amount of mercury conserved; 'Percentage' missions emphasise precision and force the player to conserve as much liquid as possible; 'Tasks' often require a lot of round-tripping and manipulation to activate switches of different colours. Indeed, the ball of mercury – and all its subdivisions, if there are any – can take on a particular colour, and it is possible to mix them up. For example, a mass of red mercury touching another mass of blue colour will form a purple unit. The title uses this mechanic to create puzzles that sometimes require the player to control multiple masses of mercury simultaneously, forcing the player to carefully divide their attention. One of the most complex instances is Orbit Bonus 3, where the platforms have holes in many areas, so navigating the maze with one mercury ball pushes the other dangerously close to the void. In general, Mercury multiplies creative ideas, either by focusing on gravity or friction.

The player is therefore encouraged to think about their movements beforehand in order to protect their mercury. It is often necessary to use barriers to temporarily block one clump and allow the others to progress through the level, either to reach a switch or to get closer to the first to make a fusion. This is both the strength and the weakness of the title. On the one hand, the levels are relatively accessible and completing the title does not require an impossible effort. If the timer is quite strict, there is always a relatively easy solution. Backed by an ethereal soundtrack, Mercury emulates well the contemplation that Varley expressed in Retrograde Summer, with mercury seen as a very malleable toy with unique physics. At the same time, the title takes the liberty of ramping up the difficulty quite considerably as the player tries to beat the high scores. It requires a great deal of creativity and flawless execution to make dangerous jumps or cut a few corners without losing material: Xero Bonus expects an absurd mastery of aerial movements and of the platform's movement cycle. This design plasticity is particularly pleasant for those who enjoy the exercise of surpassing themselves.

     Some problems and artificial difficulties

On the other hand, some levels require prior understanding to identify the solution process. Helios Percentage 1 is particularly dense and the camera makes it difficult to analyse the level, with criss-crossing pipes and switches on different floors. The introductory view always uses a camera that rotates at a rather unpleasant speed, and it is not practical to use this opening shot to dissect the various elements of a level. The title thus enforces a blind exploration that seems at odds with the puzzle design itself. In order to achieve high scores, this makes the search for the method sluggish and frustrating – as if the inspection time was counted when solving a Rubik's Cube. Overall, while it is relatively intuitive to grasp the controls for moving the mercury around, managing the camera requires considerably more effort.

Nevertheless, Mercury remains an atypical proposition for 2000s video games, favouring unique design ideas. Maclean considers the title to be his greatest achievement, interpreting it as an exception within an industry dominated by graphical performance and the homogenisation of AAA: ‘the constant raising of the production values bar doesn’t help anybody in the long run, it’ll just mean fewer developers and therefore fewer ideas, as well as fewer publishers willing to risk ever rising development budgets on new genres when instead they can stick with lower risk known-formulas’ [2]. It is remarkable how this '[lateral thinking] about development' is reflected in Mercury's gameplay itself, which is able to offer the player something new and unique.

__________
[1] John H. Varley, Retrograde Summer, in The Persistence of Vision, The Dial Press, New York, 1978.
[2] Archer Maclean, ‘Archer Maclean talks Mercury’, on Eurogamer, 8th May 2005, consulted on 20th May 2023.