Despite suffering from the Unimaginative Title Syndrome (UTS) that plagues most flash games, Psychout is pretty interesting, and it has a refreshing spirit.
As the Jonathan Blow age of the subversive platformer reluctantly draws to a close, Psychout (a savagely subversive platformer) takes a bunch of hackneyed videogame verbs and references and cleverly, unceremoniously throws them at you. The tone that emerges is downright gleeful. With its straight-jacketed protagonist, Psychout is funny, wondrous, puzzlingly fresh and pretty much completely devoid of “meaning.” And it incorporates a Pong clone.
I’ve only made one game, and it was a text-adventure type thing about working in a coffee shop and not getting tipped. Yesterday, I attempted to create my own Pong clone in Stencyl. It took me forever to even get the ball and paddles to show up on the screen, and then I had to get them to move around. God I felt stupid. The task wasn’t monumental. I wasn’t even trying to learn to code. Someone with real, practical knowledge had created a tool to make this easier for me, but it was still hard. But the resulting humility was refreshing, even exhilarating: I know nothing of games. I am a child.
And when ball and paddle finally collided for the first time, it was ecstasy. Alone in my apartment, I shouted with a stupid exuberance. I made something happen. I made something work. I felt such a significant, pure joy, it left me feeling slightly embarrassed afterwards. I tried to remember the last time a game made me feel like that. Why did I fall in love with these things? It was because of the stories, right? Yeah, because of those and that sense of losing myself in another world. But there was something else underneath: something more primal. It was the comfort of action and the satisfying immediacy of feedback. It was a verbal joy.
The princess is in another castle.
In my own efforts to squeeze every ounce of significance out of the hordes of short-form games I submit to my amateurish scrutiny, as I struggle to play even a minimal role in inching my love towards legitimacy in the eyes of Culture (and in my own eyes, admittedly), I had forgotten that joy and its source. It’s so easy to forget.
Psychout offers no grand, sweeping statements. Just tricks that you’ve seen before, remixed and rearranged: mushrooms and spikes and blocks and pipes and pong clones and a silly title, all thrown together in a stew, the poor man’s entrée. Maybe this is all the platformer has left to give us. I think I’m OK with that. Here’s to verbs.
Unfortunately, this game also suffers from the Flash game malady of combining sludgy controls with precise platforming. The level with the two pairs of moving platforms and the one that squashes you on the side is utterly unplayable for me, because the game frequently chooses not to recognize that I have jumped before I left the platform, and the hit detection on the door is completely broken; I have jumped up to it two or three times and I simply can’t see the difference between what I’ve done and what the walkthrough shows.
Very disappointing.
Sorry this one didn’t work for you. I confess that I probably don’t pay as much attention to such things as I should. I understand where you’re coming from, but I tend to forgive a platformer for imprecise controls if I find it interesting for other reasons. I had the problem you mentioned on the level you mentioned, and I just kept jumping till it worked. I had the same problem with Braid, and I just kept jumping till it worked. I had the same problem with Little Big Planet, and….well, actually I didn’t really do much with LBP. Oh well.
Wonderful write-up again dear Alex. Oh, and something else… where’s that text-adventure you mentioned?
Well, it’s not very interesting. I made the thing on my day off, and it was more of an experiment to see if I could figure out how to get music and art into a twine file. Once I got it to work (and I mean that in the most basic sense), I pretty much said that’s that. Despite all of this, I would offer you a link, but I can’t figure out how/where to upload the damn thing.