A Collection Aside
Expectations, and whether they are met, subverted or challenged, can help define your gaming experience. This month, MEGHANN O’NEILL found immense peace in an entirely sensible garden. After all, as she says to her kids when they are annoying each other,
OUTLINE
DEVELOPER DANIEL LINSSEN
PRICE $3
managore.itch.io/ outline
I see a lot of platformers with a gameplay twist. After all, why would indie developers be invested in making something that isn’t special and different? Games like Kalimba, where the control scheme moves two totems simultaneously, force the player to approach even the usual running and jumping in new ways, and it’s a great thing. Interestingly, I find that discovering these unique twists never gets boring. I’m delighted every single time.
So, I’ve been playing Outline by Daniel Linssen, the designer who made the supremely lonely desert roguelike, Sandstorm. His new release is a platformer set on a line drawing in a notebook and you are an eraser. Just consider that for a moment. Logically, perhaps you should have one shot at the level, removing everything in your wake. You’ll soon discover, however, that this game doesn’t care overmuch for logic.
Like in World of Goo, there are exclamation signs which offer advice on how to play. One of the first instructs you to jump on spikes and subsequently laughs at you when you die. The narrator is lightly malicious in a way that made me want to play well. Often signs are placed in highly dangerous or pointlessly divergent locations. Were I less invested in proving to the game that I wasn’t bad at platformers, I would have surely skipped them.
This is the thing; the more the game lures you away from your primary objective, or reaching a door to the next level, the more lines you rub out. In most cases, platforms still exist, you just can’t see them anymore. You’re looking through the page to the previous level. Other things, like circles with arrows you need to bounce from, are properly rubbed out by a careless moment of misplacement. What can’t you rub out? Deadly, spinning razors, of course. The experience is infuriating and really clever. My favourite level was an early maze where you are forced to backtrack after getting a key. There are multiple paths through and, much as you don’t want to admit it, it is impossible to remember where walls once were. You have to find the paths which make minimal impact on the features that orient your journey. And, you’ll still need to make several leaps of faith onto platforms you only half remember.
Navigating around obstacles you know are there, despite seeing something completely different, is like trying to get to the toilet at 2am, half asleep, without turning on the lights. You can probably do it successfully in the house you’ve lived in for ten years, but a pokey hotel room in Vietnam? (I nearly went in the closet. Long story.) Outline is similarly tactile, too. There were fingerprints all over my monitor after only a few levels.
The best way I can describe Outline is as an infuriating paper, pencil and eraser game you might have played with someone at the back of a boring class one afternoon at school. This person definitely didn’t like you very much and thought they were funny. You wanted to beat them just to prove you could, even though their rules were ridiculous and a cute guy was making eyes at you from the second row. The twist is, you’re secretly enjoying yourself more.