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  • screenshot100 Fred Wood’s Love is not a new game. He first contrived and released it in 2008, as an undergrad sample project. Over the last couple of years he has tweaked and fiddled with the engine and design, first opening up the game to aspiring artists with Love Custom, a stabler version of the engine that came with less music and only the one sample level. It was meant as an empty box, you see, for the end user to fill — rather like Nifflas’ FiNCK.

    And then fairly recently, there’s the game’s final incarnation, Love+. The engine is again tweaked, and the levels and music are fewer yet richer than in the original Love. As this is the newest version, and indeed the only version that Fred Wood still supports, I mean to give it the bulk of the focus here.

    Gameplay

    screenshot108 Lately I have been musing on the mechanics of loss and death, as pertains to videogames and as explored in the more artistic indie games out there. A game mechanic, of course, only makes sense in context. Each mechanism serves to illustrate to the player some concept, or to solve a logistical problem in the game’s premise. Anything that serves neither of these purposes is extraneous — and as Strunk & White say of writing, omit needless words. And if Love+ achieves anything, it is minimalism.

    Even more so than Daniel Remar’s Hero Core, Love+ strips its mechanics, presentation, and premise down to the barest possible minimum it needs to say what it sets out to say. Death is a big part of the picture, though it serves a slightly different, if familiar, role than one might expect. Instead of assigning the player a few lives then backing away, or giving the player a quicksave, or setting checkpoints or save points, or just letting the player die as much as it takes to progress, the game turns death and loss into resources for the player to tactically manage.

    You see, the game is all about momentum — more so, in its way, than the hold-right design of later Sonic the Hedgehog games. There’s a psychological energy and flow to Love+. It’s hard to separate the mechanics from the style here, as the game is so holistic. Amongst the music and the menus and the surreal two-color visuals and the feel of the controls and the crunch and twang of the sound effects, the game compels the player forward. It’s like drinking the best bottle of fruit punch ever — you don’t want to come up for air. You want to keep guzzling until the entire bottle is gone in one motion. And when you’re not drinking that punch, you’re thinking about drinking it.

    The way the game deals with this is by letting the player pace himself, set his own flow. There are only two buttons: jump, and set your respawn point. When you hit button 2, and you’re standing on solid ground, you leave in your wake a sparkly sketch of your avatar. When you die, you immediately pop back to the last place you tapped that button. There are a couple of other commands; if you get stuck you can auto-destruct, or completely reset your respawn point.

    You only have 100 lives to manage, and so eventually the balance of death and loss becomes rather interesting. Say you’re near the exit, and then you fall through a crack, way back to the beginning of the stage. Do you sacrifice a life, to jump to the respawn point you just set? Or do you spend another five minutes to run all the way back through the level again — potentially wasting another life along the way? Mind you, you can’t set a respawn point on your second lap.

    Is it more worthwhile to maintain flow, and keep charging forward, and to keep having fun and living your life, knowing that the game might become much harder down the road — or is it more worthwhile to hunker down and conserve resources and play it as safe as possible, knowing that you’ll just be frustrating yourself in the process? Well, it’s your life. It’s your decision how to live it.

    Style

    screenshot104 The music, by James Bennett, is such an integral piece here. It sounds like ice-skating rave music. Every time I hear it, I want to learn to dance with roller skates on. The music is vivacious, bright, and fluid; along with the Sonic-like intro graphics and droll explanatory text, the music lends the game a sense of sophistication and dry whimsy. Little surprise that, as with FiNCK, donation gets you a high-quality copy of the soundtrack.

    The game opens in a tiny window — maybe 100 pixels wide — that you can resize at will (and, if you’re like me, must to see what’s going on). The protagonist is a stick figure who runs and jumps with a gleeful awkwardness. The levels are simple obstacle courses sketched in three colors: black, white, and an intermediary color of some sort — blue, purple, green, orange. It varies. The intermediary color is safe to stand on. Black is the background. White goes to the active elements: the character, and particular obstacles. If it’s white, good chance it’s deadly. If not, it will probably make you bounce, or it will carry you around. It’s fairly obvious what’s what, and if it’s not obvious you’ve got enough lives that you can bear a few experiments.

    Story

    screenshot103You’re a breathless figure who wants to get through obstacle courses. Or, as Fred Wood puts it:

    Love is a platformer. True and simple. Move from the start to the finish. The game has 10 different levels, and you are graded upon completion of said levels. In this release, there are no cinematic endings, nor will there be until I have enough time and financial security to do such.

    I’m reading some irony into that last statement, as I read into much of this game. Perhaps I’m just projecting.

    Everything Else

    screenshot106 As the man says, on completion you are graded on performance — lending the game an extra compulsive value, for the people who do that. It’s an awfully Sega-like move. Actually, the whole game drips of a Sega aesthetic. Much as Streets of Rage sets itself apart from other brawlers with its soundtrack and breezy aesthetic, and as OutRun is basically a five-minute dream trip timed to a bossa of your choice, Love+ uses basic and familiar elements to set an atmosphere and evoke a certain wistful optimism. Even its title calls to mind Tetsuya Mizuguchi at his most coherent.

    Whatever else it evokes, the game is simply joyous to play, and every element of the game works together to achieve that goal. It’s not particularly hard, though portions are tricky. Since you can pace yourself, it’s rarely frustrating. Since there are only eleven levels, you should be able to finish at least the second time through, once you’ve mastered the respawn dynamics. From then on it’s a matter of mastery, and then of designing your own levels. And to that extent, Love Custom makes it as easy as humanly possible. Just edit a two-color .gif file in a painting program, and dump it in the appropriate directory. And there you are.

    You can download a five-level demo of Love+ at Fred Wood’s site. As of last week, paying for the “complete and final” build gets you the full eleven levels (one previously unseen) and access to an online scoreboard. Which does sound rather complete and final.

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