Daray Manning’s Baggage
June 26, 2010
by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne
Undoubtedly Rockford Illinois’ premiere indie game developer, Manning betrays his Cactus/biggt heritage, as well as a touch of Eugene Jarvis, in his skewed-n-crackly platformer study Baggage. The game is one of those hardcore S&M things, where you die a dozen times just to work out how to get past an obstacle. The generous aspect is that modern indie convention of infinite lives and just trying again without a pause. Yet the game does a good job of instilling a certain dread, both though its difficulty and through its presentation.
Just about every line could use a carpenter’s level, resulting an a dissonant Dutch angle effect. Likewise, every solid surface is filled with an ever-changing static and the background (and sometimes the foreground) is filled with an ominous orange fog. Your character is tiny; the levels are comparably large on the screen. Each has a sort of strange, one-straw-short-of-familiar shape to it. Ostensibly helpful text scrolls across the screen, though it spends more time taunting or giving inane protips or generally being bleak.
You can only jump and double-jump. Whenever you touch a spike, you die. When you die, you die in a sudden explosion of pixel flame, accompanied by a deafening Robotron-esque “CHAAGF!” It will make you jump, especially if you didn’t expect to mess up. You will want to avoid messing up, to avoid being startled.
All in all, a neat, expressive entry to the dev scene. Although a deliberately simple riff on the now-familiar art platformer, there’s something delightfully organic here. You can download Baggage or play it online at YoYoGames’site.
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