“Violent Delight”, by Coral Nulla. I’m gonna hide the rest of this review, because nobody should be reading a review of this particular game without trying it first.
Summary
I made the mistake of reading a few reviews before playing it, so the unusual intro sequence wasn’t a surprise to me. I bid on a game. Then waited an hour for it to ship. A real hour. There was more to do while I waited than I thought there would be. Some other buttons on the screen to click. Meditation. Composing the intro of my review. Then at some point I gave up and said “I’m not playing this stupid game.”
Several years ago I read a review of one of my past games that said “when a game simulates a boring experience, it’s a boring game”. That advice is a truism. Every game developer knows it. But there are still reasons a developer might simulate a boring experience anyway; to prank the audience (Penn and Teller’s “Desert Bus Game”), or because the author is working through some personal issues by writing a game (which is not a boring experience) about an earlier experience, or because the author simply misunderstood that their topic was boring (how many times has he Towers of Hanoi puzzle been implemented? probably on more systems than the “Cloak of Darkness.”). I don’t presume to understand why Coral Nulla put a one hour delay on the start of this game, which is why I have hidden the details of this post. But seriously, I wasn’t going to play it.
Except that I inadvertently left the window open and when I came back it had actually loaded. That was when the real surprises began. This is genuinely a creepy game. It is proof enough that you don’t need high rez, five billion color graphics to create a mood. You don’t even need a plot. In fact I think the weirdness of it enhances its mood; the descent into deeper and deeper levels, with creepier messages and less time to read them, enforced by repeating cycles of hurry up and wait.
A couple things I noticed: the time allowed on each successive level gets shorter. the theme of each level correspond roughly to the anxieties and traumas of each age level, from the taunts of playground bullies, to the test anxiety of high school, and eventually into the workforce. Finally some of the messages on level 11 (which may or may not be the final level) call the player out of the computer world and into their own world; check your own basement, you hear?
For me, I saw some parallels (probably not deliberate) with “My Father’s Long long legs”, in terms of the “exploring downward” aspect, and also the change in screen color at the final level. But what this game did which set it apart from anything I’ve seen before was to perfect the use of the pacing timer, using it to both speed up and slow down the player’s heart rate. I just don’t understand why it needed such a long delay at the beginning?