Game Theory: When Death Makes Us Laugh

A screenshot of Super Hexagon.

Kirk, Chris, Stephen, everyone,

For me, the year's best in video games started and ended with low-budget titles homegrown by independent developers. At a glance, games like Super Hexagon and Hotline Miami appear to share little in common. Both ooze style, at least, thanks to eye-searing colors and crunchy electronica soundtracks. Critics especially noted both for their steep difficulty curves.

Hotline Miami is a blood-spackled gorefest in which the guts and brains of fallen enemies are represented by fat trails of salmon-pink pixels. Bullets ricochet spasmodically, and once an opp onent sees your character, enemies rush in faster than you can escape. A single swift blow and you're dead, game over. “Hotline Miami is an exercise in survival,” the game developer Rami Ismail wrote at Gamasutra. “Any mistake I make is my last.”

Super Hexagon, meanwhile, is a careening acid-trip of a game, almost a tunnel-shooter (just, without any shooting), your cursor orbiting concentric rings in search of escape. Suffer an indecisive moment, any hesitation, and your tiny triangle is already hurtling into the maze's wall. “Super Hexagon is a game,” the reviewer James Cunningham lamented, “about failing to not die.”

It's a return to the oldest of old-school game design, really. As in Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, the ultimate goal is to jump every obstacle and survive the stage. These games demand phys ical knack, but they also hinge on pattern recognition and memorization. In a sense, they are puzzle games.

Both Super Hexagon and Hotline Miami are torture to play. But upon “death,” players - I've taken an informal survey, here - tend to toss their heads backward and giggle riotously.

That's because players are never discouraged. In Super Hexagon, one slap at the space bar (or, in iOS, a tap on the screen) returns you to the beginning of the 60-second stage. In Hotline Miami, too, death is hardly final. “R to restart,” the last screen entreats, and suddenly you are returned to the first entryway of a very short level.

How does a game torture you, the player, without making you stamp off in defeat? It's a fine line to walk, and the makers of both games handle it deftly: These games succeed by making the barrier to re-entry so low. The player, in turn, is never permanently punished. (Some games are needlessly vindictive; Hexagon and Miami are instea d forgiving, in their own way.) “ ‘Dying' isn't the right word,” I recently told a friend, struggling to explain Hexagon's appeal. You don't “die”; you just fail. And you repeat that failure until you succeed.

The ultraviolent Hotline Miami is, at its heart, a character study, driven by a narrator who becomes increasingly unreliable as the story moves forward. Without giving too much away (I hope), Klei Entertainment's excellent Mark of the Ninja employs the very same trope.

Mark of the Ninja is a 2-D action/stealth sidescroller. Sometimes it more resembles a puzzle game. You can either tiptoe or brute-force your way through; to succeed, however, you'll have to do multiple trial runs, committing every obstacle to memory. In a review for Paste, I wrote that, despite my innate gracelessness, “Mark of the Ninja turned me into a meticulous, thoughtful person, pulling from reserves of patience I didn't know I had.”

To play Mark of the Ninja properly, you must play it twice. The first time, that's all just training. By Ninja's second half - New Game+, it's called - a single misstep will send you spinning back to the latest checkpoint. Your ninja's vantage is now limited to the few short paces just ahead, and if your character can see an enemy, that must mean … ! New Game+ plays out exactly the way, I suspect, the designers intended the entire game to play, if only the players themselves could handle it.

It's really, really tough. You'll “die” a lot. And yet the game is never frustrating (except for one ill-conceived sequence where the pacing is off-kilter, and suddenly Mark of the Ninja is not frustrating, but infuriating). It's my personal pick for overall game of the year.

All these indies succeed because they offer deep challenges with low-stakes fai lure. “Challenging your player,” I recently speculated in an e-mail to a colleague, “is very much like challenging a reader. It's how you tell him that you trust him, that you care.”

 

Jenn Frank writes for Unwinnable. Her work has appeared at Motherboard and GameSetWatch, and in Kill Screen Magazine.