novozodiaco
2024
looper is an arcade minigame from the 2024 brazilian game "Astro Pig", and I will proceed to review it. full disclaimer: I personally know the devs, and some of them are my friends. however, if you think this disqualifies my opinion because I'm just going to say stuff to warm their heart, rest assured that it's the exact opposite: I imagine this is not the type of opinion that they want to hear. just imagine if you invited someone to your house, worked your ass off making them dinner, and then they spent the entire afternoon admiring a single olive you cooked; that's basically what's happening here.
hear me, though: it's the best hecking olive you're ever going to taste.
in looper, you control a ship. or, more accurately, you try to control one: this asteroids-ass polygon moves forwards indefinitely, and the only move you have is choosing in which direction to shoot its cannon. said cannon is so powerful that, once you shoot it, the ship's direction changes to the complete opposite direction -- this is the main way you move, by exploiting recoil. after you figure this simple action out (which is the only action you have), the game's two main goals become clear as day: collect little diamonds that appear in random places throughout the screen (like snake's apples), and avoid the little circles that pop up randomly and result in a game over if you touch them.
"sounds pretty simple to me", you say, and in a way you are right -- but also very wrong. because the first thing that becomes apparent is that controlling this ship is hard as shit: humans are simply not built to calculate angles with such precision and in such short-notice: sometimes a diamond seems ripe for the taking, but -- oh no! --, you missed it, and then you try to correct it, and you end up making things worse. or you plot your path towards the next diamond with great accuracy, but lo and behold a hecking circle appears and you need to move out of its way lest you hecking crash, but -- oh no again! -- you died anyway because in trying to avoid the first circle, you crashed into a different one....... so collecting and avoiding, though simple to describe, are goddamn hard, and the game simply doesn't let up -- it spawns more and more circles as time goes on, making it even harder to survive, and it even spawns a second enemy type at some point (an arrow that works just like the circles, but is much faster)...
and then you start to notice some weird stuff.
whenever you collect a diamond, the ship gets a short-lived "bubble" that destroys any enemies on your path -- like pacman's big pellet, or mario's star. this gives you some way to fight through the evolving chaos of the game, and encourages you to not just plot a path towards the next juicy diamond, but do so in a way that maximizes the circles and arrows you're going to encounter soon after. it's very elegant, you think, how they took one object and forced it do two jobs at once (both carrot you eat and stick you beat with). and in a way, the movement action follows the same philosophy, does it not? since it serves both as your movement, and as your way to shoot...
wait, what are we shooting again?
oh GOD they're not circles they're BULLETS. you're shooting YOURSELF.
yes, you heard that right: you're the one hecking up your life in this game. because every time you move, every time you shoot your teeny little weeny cannon, you bring into existence another one of these circle-bullets that you hate so much. that's why the game gets harder as you advance: not because of some scripted difficulty curve, or because of the introduction of some new enemy or mechanic, but simply because they're catching up to you -- the mistakes you made while you were young.
because that's what this is about, isn't it? about mistakes. looper is a game where time does not fix everything: every mistake you make endures on, forever, until you personally deal with them. this is in stark contrast not only to most games -- where time brings change, good or bad --, but also to life, where the ghastly veil of death serves to all as the only certainty in our future. looper massively subverts that: in it, time exists, but only as an impotent side-character -- necessary to move the plot forward, but powerless besides. your mistakes are not erased by time, they only inch forward. are they coming closer? farther? hard to know -- you gotta carry on and find out. in fact, your mistakes are not even erased by SPACE, beautifully enough: once they disappear out of sight, they reappear in a different place, just as deadly as before -- but with a new spice of unpredictability, since it is hard to predict in the heat of the moment where exactly they are going to appear (which leads one to avoid the screen edges like the plague).
to be fair, time can mess you in looper, BIG time -- but in a subtle way that I find very beautiful. remember those little arrows I mentioned earlier? they do not spawn randomly either: they are the ghosts of diamonds you did not pick. that's right: in looper, not only "doing stuff badly" is a mistake, but not doing anything is even WORSE, since it spawns mistakes that are faster and therefore harder to predict. the procedural rhetoric is so goddamn motivational, it's like if ian bogost had a zen phase instead of writing political op-eds that no one reads
in some ways, I think looper is as elegant as tetris -- another game about mistakes that endure forever, in which the only way to correct them is to do something right for a change. but tetris is planning with a little sprinkle of reaction speed, while looper is reaction speed with a little sprinkle of planning. this makes tetris more accessible for the majority of players (and easier to lose yourself into, since the early game is so slow at first), but at the same time I still think looper is the most "elegant" of the two, due to its fewer assumptions and overall duality. someone get this to keith burgun's door
the crown jewel here, though, must be looper's starting screen. as described above, figuring out looper's mechanics was a big part of my experience, however it did not need to be so -- it is all explained on the starting screen, after all, if you know how to read it.... on this starting screen, the ship is still, and as you press A to start the game, some little jingle-dance happens that I did not understand at all, but that later became clear as day: what happens is that the A is the same button as shooting, so the ship shoots horizontally, and as you go in the other direction, you end up picking a surgically-placed diamond, which leaves you invulnerable long enough to destroy the bullet you shot as you started the game. that's it: all the game's mechanics shown to you in the space of 2 seconds. it's the idea of the "tutorial" not as a series of steps to be concluded, but as a book teaching you how to read: once you are able to understand what's written, you do not need it anymore. the tutorial as an inside joke that gets repeated until you, too, come to understand and laugh at it. the tutorial as a jab at someone who asked for a tutorial
looper is a dual game. shooting is your way to move around, and part of the reason why you need to move around. diamonds must be collected and, if you take too long, must be avoided. you are both the player and the one responsible for messing up the player's life. it is so elegant and simple that I am inclined to believe that it is not a game one builds -- rather, it's a game one discovers, perhaps under a bush in the infinite space of possible games; a rare tome in the ludotheque of babel, nested between "nintengnomes" and pokémon vietnamese crystal 2. it's only fair, then, that you must too find it, and gaze upon the stars...
hear me, though: it's the best hecking olive you're ever going to taste.
in looper, you control a ship. or, more accurately, you try to control one: this asteroids-ass polygon moves forwards indefinitely, and the only move you have is choosing in which direction to shoot its cannon. said cannon is so powerful that, once you shoot it, the ship's direction changes to the complete opposite direction -- this is the main way you move, by exploiting recoil. after you figure this simple action out (which is the only action you have), the game's two main goals become clear as day: collect little diamonds that appear in random places throughout the screen (like snake's apples), and avoid the little circles that pop up randomly and result in a game over if you touch them.
"sounds pretty simple to me", you say, and in a way you are right -- but also very wrong. because the first thing that becomes apparent is that controlling this ship is hard as shit: humans are simply not built to calculate angles with such precision and in such short-notice: sometimes a diamond seems ripe for the taking, but -- oh no! --, you missed it, and then you try to correct it, and you end up making things worse. or you plot your path towards the next diamond with great accuracy, but lo and behold a hecking circle appears and you need to move out of its way lest you hecking crash, but -- oh no again! -- you died anyway because in trying to avoid the first circle, you crashed into a different one....... so collecting and avoiding, though simple to describe, are goddamn hard, and the game simply doesn't let up -- it spawns more and more circles as time goes on, making it even harder to survive, and it even spawns a second enemy type at some point (an arrow that works just like the circles, but is much faster)...
and then you start to notice some weird stuff.
whenever you collect a diamond, the ship gets a short-lived "bubble" that destroys any enemies on your path -- like pacman's big pellet, or mario's star. this gives you some way to fight through the evolving chaos of the game, and encourages you to not just plot a path towards the next juicy diamond, but do so in a way that maximizes the circles and arrows you're going to encounter soon after. it's very elegant, you think, how they took one object and forced it do two jobs at once (both carrot you eat and stick you beat with). and in a way, the movement action follows the same philosophy, does it not? since it serves both as your movement, and as your way to shoot...
wait, what are we shooting again?
oh GOD they're not circles they're BULLETS. you're shooting YOURSELF.
yes, you heard that right: you're the one hecking up your life in this game. because every time you move, every time you shoot your teeny little weeny cannon, you bring into existence another one of these circle-bullets that you hate so much. that's why the game gets harder as you advance: not because of some scripted difficulty curve, or because of the introduction of some new enemy or mechanic, but simply because they're catching up to you -- the mistakes you made while you were young.
because that's what this is about, isn't it? about mistakes. looper is a game where time does not fix everything: every mistake you make endures on, forever, until you personally deal with them. this is in stark contrast not only to most games -- where time brings change, good or bad --, but also to life, where the ghastly veil of death serves to all as the only certainty in our future. looper massively subverts that: in it, time exists, but only as an impotent side-character -- necessary to move the plot forward, but powerless besides. your mistakes are not erased by time, they only inch forward. are they coming closer? farther? hard to know -- you gotta carry on and find out. in fact, your mistakes are not even erased by SPACE, beautifully enough: once they disappear out of sight, they reappear in a different place, just as deadly as before -- but with a new spice of unpredictability, since it is hard to predict in the heat of the moment where exactly they are going to appear (which leads one to avoid the screen edges like the plague).
to be fair, time can mess you in looper, BIG time -- but in a subtle way that I find very beautiful. remember those little arrows I mentioned earlier? they do not spawn randomly either: they are the ghosts of diamonds you did not pick. that's right: in looper, not only "doing stuff badly" is a mistake, but not doing anything is even WORSE, since it spawns mistakes that are faster and therefore harder to predict. the procedural rhetoric is so goddamn motivational, it's like if ian bogost had a zen phase instead of writing political op-eds that no one reads
in some ways, I think looper is as elegant as tetris -- another game about mistakes that endure forever, in which the only way to correct them is to do something right for a change. but tetris is planning with a little sprinkle of reaction speed, while looper is reaction speed with a little sprinkle of planning. this makes tetris more accessible for the majority of players (and easier to lose yourself into, since the early game is so slow at first), but at the same time I still think looper is the most "elegant" of the two, due to its fewer assumptions and overall duality. someone get this to keith burgun's door
the crown jewel here, though, must be looper's starting screen. as described above, figuring out looper's mechanics was a big part of my experience, however it did not need to be so -- it is all explained on the starting screen, after all, if you know how to read it.... on this starting screen, the ship is still, and as you press A to start the game, some little jingle-dance happens that I did not understand at all, but that later became clear as day: what happens is that the A is the same button as shooting, so the ship shoots horizontally, and as you go in the other direction, you end up picking a surgically-placed diamond, which leaves you invulnerable long enough to destroy the bullet you shot as you started the game. that's it: all the game's mechanics shown to you in the space of 2 seconds. it's the idea of the "tutorial" not as a series of steps to be concluded, but as a book teaching you how to read: once you are able to understand what's written, you do not need it anymore. the tutorial as an inside joke that gets repeated until you, too, come to understand and laugh at it. the tutorial as a jab at someone who asked for a tutorial
looper is a dual game. shooting is your way to move around, and part of the reason why you need to move around. diamonds must be collected and, if you take too long, must be avoided. you are both the player and the one responsible for messing up the player's life. it is so elegant and simple that I am inclined to believe that it is not a game one builds -- rather, it's a game one discovers, perhaps under a bush in the infinite space of possible games; a rare tome in the ludotheque of babel, nested between "nintengnomes" and pokémon vietnamese crystal 2. it's only fair, then, that you must too find it, and gaze upon the stars...
2020
As a long-standing fan of Zer0 Rei's 3D art (which I have been using as my desktop wallpapers for years), I was curious about this game when I saw it recommended on an Errant Signal video. Then, after reading someone compare it to Outer Wilds on a Steam Review, that curiosity became an instant purchase.
Sadly, the game does little to deserve that comparison. There is a strong veneer of mystery here, built through its cryptic presentation (the story is vague and abstract, the achievements are full of random symbols, the main menus mostly contains no words); however, it does not take long for that mystery to completely evaporate. Because pretty soon after starting your game, you encounter levels that are literally "find three switches and activate them to proceed" -- one of the most basic level design patterns that you can probably think of. And it's level after level of this kind of thing. Sure, they introduce new mechanics to shake things up, but oatmeal with topping is still oatmeal.
So although Venineth wants you to feel like you're controlling a mysterious alien mechanism incomprehensible to human minds, you actually just feel like you're playing a videogame.
The game is visually incredible, make no mistake, and controlling the marble is sometimes frustrating but still very fun. It's the level design that dropped the ball here -- and as you probably know, in a marble game dropping the ball can be quite fatal..............
Sadly, the game does little to deserve that comparison. There is a strong veneer of mystery here, built through its cryptic presentation (the story is vague and abstract, the achievements are full of random symbols, the main menus mostly contains no words); however, it does not take long for that mystery to completely evaporate. Because pretty soon after starting your game, you encounter levels that are literally "find three switches and activate them to proceed" -- one of the most basic level design patterns that you can probably think of. And it's level after level of this kind of thing. Sure, they introduce new mechanics to shake things up, but oatmeal with topping is still oatmeal.
So although Venineth wants you to feel like you're controlling a mysterious alien mechanism incomprehensible to human minds, you actually just feel like you're playing a videogame.
The game is visually incredible, make no mistake, and controlling the marble is sometimes frustrating but still very fun. It's the level design that dropped the ball here -- and as you probably know, in a marble game dropping the ball can be quite fatal..............