Staring across the table to Thirty Flights Of Loving, it could be viewed as a brief, almost throw-away interactive experience that can just be appreciated as a breezy and bright first-person adventure trying to cleverly tell a non-linearly woven crime story … and then it’s all over. I think it will remain obtuse and unsatisfying to some but I’ve always been one to be won over by style and so I’ve found myself captured by Thirty Flights’ gaze while becoming more enamoured the deeper I look into it. The mesmerising feeling this gem, polished to a sheen, was able to create in my mind while playing is too easy to take for granted.

(If you are decided on playing Thirty Flights of Loving now or at any point later on as you read this, just know that the sooner you stop reading the fresher it will be as an experience for you but there won’t be any true spoilers till the story section.)

Brendon Chung who designed it as the prequel to the beloved freeware game Gravity Bone has once again achieved so much with so little (if you do want to read about Gravity Bone then I suggest reading this post by ThatFrood, who runs out of larger font sizes by the end of it in trying to persuade you to play it). Thirty Flights has even less in it that would characterise it as a game as it pushes closer to what is a filmic experience and yet I don’t think its interactivity is redundant despite it succeeding best in two areas that film is particularly at home with: atmosphere and pacing.

Atmosphere

It’s almost ridiculous how strong an impression the atmosphere of many of the scenes in the Thirty Flights were able to leave on me as I played through it, given that I was often only spending seconds of time in any one of them, but despite the simplicity and sparseness of the assets, the art direction and use of sound is so strong that it works in the game’s favour and each location becomes very memorable. There is always just enough animation or an option for interaction with objects in the scene that allows it to come alive and for it to be a world that I actually believe in. I’ve often wondered at the fact that some settings from the best loved films have become so well known and familiar to people, seared into their minds, despite these places often appearing for only a few minutes on film ever. They’ve stuck around and I think I few scenes from Thirty Flights will stick with me for some time yet as well.

Pacing

If I were to choose just one thing from this game that is a revelation and potentially ground-breaking for games then it would be Thirty Flights use of the jump cut because it just works so well. In the game I’ll have just chosen to take one of three routes down corridors that were open to me and then suddenly there’s a jump cut and I find I’m hurtling down a new area. Simply not having to make the full journey down a corridor always, actually takes away a great thing about many games which is in the selling of this really being your experience because everywhere you’ve travelled is as a direct result of your control, but in its place it allows an interactive experience to more readily set a pace that better carries the thrill of an adventure. As the cut takes place the brain automatically fills in the fiction that time has passed and I’ve simply reached this new area and even more ingeniously it didn’t matter which of those 3 corridors I took because they all could have been the one that lead me to this new location as far as my brain knows. So Thirty Flights has some great travelling sequences that maintain momentum as a result but that’s not the only option the jump cut affords and which the game makes use of. In this case it can also transport you to (or flash onto the screen for a few seconds) a completely different location that falls out of sequence of a linear chronology and so juxtapose a prior happening with the current one. It can take you out of a frantic moment into a calm one and vice-versa and my reckoning is that Thirty Flights completely nails this. Even the timings of things happening within a scene or as a result of an interaction are just right to keep the adventure moving.

Story

(Some specific plot spoilers from hereon)

Thirty Loves’ format is exactly how I like my stories – with heaps of style, throwing me into the middle of situations without necessarily explaining everything that’s going on to me, leaving my brain to piece together what’s going on. As my body flew off that motorcycle leaving me standing before ‘The End’ my brain which had already been working on deciphering the puzzle of the story was left in the sudden void-like stillness to chew on the meaning at my leisure, no longer with the inexorable forward push of the narrative. I undoubtedly had some emotional reactions drawn naturally from me during the playing out of the different scenes and glancing behind me at the crashed car in mid-air brought the hit to the gut I’d felt seconds earlier in the previous scene straight back to me. However, I wasn’t fully able to satisfactorily piece the story together even after a long time of thinking. I’ve played through it many more times now and I may have it mostly figured out but there were some key things I missed the first 2, even 6 times through the game and I think it is fair observation that this story would have been most powerful if I was able to piece it together the first time through with the minimum of ambiguity relating to the key details. I accept that everyone’s brain will have a different level of speed and success with recognising and piecing together a story and so not everyone can be catered for perfectly but missing the fact that a late flash up on screen of a woman on the bed in which I’d slept with Anita was not Anita but someone else is a fairly critical thing and perhaps that could have been made more obvious – maybe it’s just me. Likewise, that Anita in the part of the chronology in which the failed raid on the airport takes place had a bionic leg and arm suggesting the accident at the end had already taken place was only realised by me on a repeat playthrough and I almost think it was expected that this wouldn’t be realised the first time through but if it could have been possible to have left more clues so that it was realised by most players after a few minutes thought straight after the ending of the game then it would have had more impact. I am totally aware this is a very hard thing to tune and maybe this was not the designed intention in any case.

Leaving on a positive note though, Thirty Flight succeeded in drawing me towards Anita and in making me having some semblance of feelings towards her despite the limited interactions I had with her not providing any real choice – nevertheless the tale being wrought coaxed me along such that those were the interactions I naturally wanted to take, even though they were based on loose inclinations that only had a second’s thought behind them. To manage that, is just one more triumph among many others which Thirty Flight Of Loving manages to achieve.