Lawsuits aside, I’m a huge fan of the Bit.Trip series. I may wish nothing but destruction on Gaijin Games, but hell if they don’t make some fantastic stuff.
Bit.Trip Runner, Gaijin’s newest game, was playable on the GDC expo floor. As the first Bit.Trip platformer and the first game in the series to not consist entirely of abstract visuals, I was very curious as to what I’d see once I put my hands on the controller.
These are my impressions.
Hrm.
Runner controls as well as you’d expect: the platforming is incredibly precise, and it’s surprisingly easy to make a distinction between the stuff you need to interact with and the considerable visual noise that comprises the background. Each jump and dodge results in a sort of 8-bit beep, and the obstacles are thrown at you in such a way that by successfully navigating the level, you also sort-of create a song. From a musical perspective, the game is more along the lines of the uberlinear Bit.Trip Beat than the more improvisational Bit.Trip Core, but it still sounds distinctly like a Bit.Trip game. When you’re doing well, you get into that same sort of aesthetic nirvana where everything — the visuals, the music, and your own control — feel as if they’re in a kooky, transcendental harmony.
Also, if you do anything wrong, at any point, you have to repeat the entire level. No checkpoints.
The game consists of 36 levels in total along with a few unlockable special stages. I couldn’t finish the level I attempted, so I can’t say how long they are, but I do know that about 60% of my time with Runner consisted of me replaying the first fifteen seconds of the level over and over and over again.
On the one hand, this makes a sort of sense: Runner is the series’ most visually referential work since Beat, and it’s understandable that the sort of trial-and-error gameplay that categorized so many of Runner‘s influences should make an appearance here. Even beyond the aesthetic reward of doing well, the game gets incredibly tense once you start dodging obstacles with some level of effectiveness: given that one mistake will send you back to the start, I felt a constant tension that I’d never really gotten from the previous games in the series.
On the other hand, gone is that wonderful health system from previous Bit.Trip games, where a half-dozen small mistakes eventually turned into larger ones, eventually reducing all the visual sexiness from the screen until all the music and graphics were gone save for a few white dots and some minimal beeping noises. Gone is the sensation of finding yourself just one or two missed beats away from plunging into failure, desperate to do just a little bit better, to get that little bit of health back so you can go back to screwing up every once in a while. That rhythmic, elegant give-and-take that allowed the player to make mistakes while steadily learning the different beat configurations and patterns has been replaced with intense fear and a demand for pinpoint precision.
Not to say that one type of design is demonstrably better than another, or anything: the GDC expo floor is a stressful place to try any game, and it’s tremendously hard to get a feel for how the game will truly play when you’ve only got a few minutes with it. Once I start playing the full version at home, perhaps the constant retries will become an integral and compelling part of the experience. Maybe the frequent death with give the game its own unique, funky rhythm on par with the more forgiving experience of playing something like Core.
Either way: Bit.Trip Runner is unlike anything we’ve yet seen from Gaijin Games, and that excites me more than anything.
