I always thought the Bit.Trip series seemed interesting, and always intended to give it a shot. I even bought Bit.Trip Runner for the Wii when it came out, but I never really got deep into it, probably both because it was difficult and because by 2010 I was rarely turning my Wii on for any reason.
When the Bit.Trip came out for Ps4 and Vita at the end of last year I bought it immediately for $10 and...didn't touch it. But about a week ago I was looking for something new to mess around with on Vita and saw the Bit.Trip in my library, so I downloaded it to my overpriced memory card and started it fresh.
This background is relevant because by the time I actually started playing Bit.Trip Runner somewhat 'seriously' I had basically forgotten everything about the game except the design of Commander Video and a vague memory that it was difficult.
Bit.Trip Runner is in many ways a perfect Vita game. It has great visuals and music, simple controls, is perfect for sessions of almost any length, and runs pretty well on the Vita (though I think I detected some dropped frames.)
So I was playing the game on train trips and such, breezing through the first few levels and enjoying the difficulty ramp up...and then I hit level 1-11, the Odyssey, and holy cow.
See Bit.Trip Runner is built on a very simple premise. It has a few moves, like jump, slide, kick, that you use to navigate a world where your character moves at a constant pace. There are various obstacles in the way, which you evade by jumping over, sliding under, or kicking through. The game gets its difficulty and engaging nature by requiring careful timing and lulling you into patterns of reaction that it then breaks, forcing you to, for example, tap out a series of jumps to a certain beat, then pause, jump over another obstacle, and immediately slide, while your brain, used to a patterns, is telling you to jump again. It's a game that rewards patience, memorization, and precision. Each level sets up a specific series of challenges and trains you to defeat them. Very old school game design, and the game explicitly offers homages to the old Atari consoles and specifically the 2600 game Pitfall.
When you hit an obstacle you get hurled back to the beginning of the level and get to try again. There are no lives, no power-ups (other than those related to score) and no check points within a level.
Over the course of the first 10 levels Bit.Trip Runner introduces its concept, shows you the various obstacles, reveals a risk/reward system around grabbing optional items that boost your score, and offers up its challenges in manageable sequences that take about a minute to complete.
On the eleventh level Bit.Trip Runner offers up a level that's about 3 or 4 times longer than the ones you've just been through, and much more devious and nasty in its design. It is full of tricky little areas meant to force you into unintuitive patterns and to memorize long, challenging sections. At first it seems like old school level design in its most punishing form. The kind of level that made me bail on any number of rented Nintendo games that seemed focused on frustrating rather than entertaining the player.
As I played through this long, difficult level I did find myself frustrated, but never overwhelmingly so. I played and died and played and died, and seemed to master sections only to die on them repeatedly in subsequent tries because of the tight required timing, and I played on, frustrated but still enjoying myself. I wondered how the game could get away with being so frustrating so early on without me deleting it off my Vita, or at the very least switching to another game in the collection. Instead I found myself downloading a copy of the game to my PS4 so I could give the level a try on a larger screen with a real controller (the game has cross-save and cross-buy.)
So what makes this tough level so compelling? As far as I can tell a few things.
1) The game is relatively fair. The level does not introduce new obstacles, it just remixes stuff you've already seen and have learned how to get past. Furthermore, the game doesn't really rely on unfair surprises. You see everything as its coming and you either react properly or you don't. It's challenging but it's not arbitrary.
2) The game encourages memorization and muscle memory by moving you at a constant pace. While levels in games like Ninja Gaiden you were always playing the same level, it would play a little different each time because of your own variation. If you moved at a different rate or jumped at a different point you might find yourself with an enemy in a totally different position, often dying because a bat or something else was at a different height than you were used to and knocked you into a pit. Bit.Trip Runner doesn't do that. Each challenge is the same each time, allowing for true mastery and ameliorating the irritation of being sent back to the beginning of the level with each collision.
3) The game uses its points powerups to give you an idea of your progress. Most levels in the game have about 25 gold pickups, but 1-11 has 93. That tells you right off it will be extra long, and you can get an idea of how far you're progressing based on how much gold you've collected or passed. This alleviates the frustration of a level feeling endless and you feeling like you're not making actual progress because you don't know how long it is.
4) Instant restart. Non-negotiable for a level like this that will require dozens of attempts.
5) Encouraging visuals and music. Even though the game is hard it FEELS friendly and encouraging. when you get to extra mode by picking up all the "plus" points power ups you get a sweet rainbow and the soundtrack bursts into overdrive. You feel good and powerful even as you're failing over and over. This is in opposition to something like Dante's Inferno in the Ryan's Inferno video, where it keeps saying "You're a sad, false, shell of a man," which just compounds the frustration.
Playing through the level and finally defeating it (along with the following boss level, which was also pretty tough) gave me an appreciation for how carefully and mindfully a game like Bit.Trip Runner is designed. The game emulates the challenges of the past, but also learns from more modern design to make a level that's both challenging and fun and encouraging. It's the same careful design that is shown in the rest of the game, from its visuals and sound track to the way that the visual design of certain objects tells you how to use them (on world 2 there's an enemy you can jump over or bounce on, which you can instantly tell by the design of the creature)
Most of the time when a game is well designed this kind of stuff is hidden beneath the surface, but playing the level over and over gave me a chance to truly appreciate it, and the game I found it in. I've heard that level 3-11 is similar but even more difficult. I'm sort of looking forward to it.
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