Mortal Harvey

A well-designed platformer, inspired in theme by both “Weird Al” Yankovic and Mortal Kombat. The protagonist has personality, and he moves both quickly and precisely. When he dies, he dies gorily. When he waits around, he gets impatient.

Mortal Harvey is almost certainly the most developed game in the Eclypse catalog, consisting of several varied levels, each full of atmospheric background animation and neat tile tricks. It’s a hard game, full of traps and too-precise leaps.

Most significant, I think, is an elevator level that takes the ideas from Ego Force down a different path. From a design standpoint, this level is basically static. The player can run back and forth on a platform, while the background animates, giving an impression of movement. To give the level some danger, obstacles in the form of monster tiles slowly drift downward, into the visible frame at a rate that matches the background animation. The end impression is that the player is hurtling skyward, avoiding objects along the way. Once the player has avoided an entire vertical map’s worth of monster tiles, a timer gives out, allowing the player access to an exit.

The subjective use of monster tiles is just as important here as the false scrolling technique. What Jim Faux does here, that you see only rarely in other Game-Maker games, is he distinguishes between the actual mechanical behavior of the game elements and their apparent behavior. Monster tiles don’t have to be monsters. Character tiles don’t have to be characters. You don’t have to scroll to give the impression of scrolling. Taken to an extreme, active animation can apparently move whole hunks of the scenery at once. It’s all sleight of hand, and yet what else is game design but psychology?