Thirty Flights of Loving Review
Blendo Games has been around for a number of years now. It exists as a one man development studio and that man is Brendon Chung. While Chung has worked at other, larger studios, Blendo Games has served as the label for his more home-cooked projects, of which Thirty Flights of Loving is the latest. It tells the story of a trio planning and trying to pull off a heist. The highlight of the game is the innovative methods used to tell the story. There is no dialogue, narration, or instructions. You are left to explore the environment and to try piecing together everything on your own.
One of the key mechanics in the game is how it jumps around through time as you play it. At times this serves as a powerful tool to challenge your mind. With no clear explanations of what’s going on, you are always on the lookout for clues to help you try and figure it out. The artistic style deserves praise for its originality. Looking at screenshots you can instantly tell this game apart and that is becoming an increasingly difficult task with the vast number of games coming out each year. The audio was simple, to the point, and worked well with with the other elements.
The biggest issue with the game is that it’s hard to classify it as a game. Yes, you run around and can look around, but that’s about it. The game never allows deviation from it’s linearity and you don’t really have control over anything. There are a few areas where it appears that there are multiple ways you can go. This isn’t really so because after taking a few steps the whole game just skips you forward to the next point on the line. Its not just the lack of options that’s a problem. There are plenty of great games on the market which are highly linear. The issue is the lack of impactfulness. Nothing you do has any impact on what happens. This is a game which would be just as enjoyable to watch the playthrough on youtube as it is to play it yourself. The value proposition is another area where Thirty Flights of Loving struggles. At $5 you might ask how it could possibly be overpriced. Well, completing the game took under 15 minutes. Completing it twice took under a half hour. That makes for a relatively expensive half hour. There are many other indie games available that offer incomparably better cost to hours entertained ratios.
After you finish the game you are given an option to replay it with special text snippets located periodically throughout the game which have Chung discussing the development process. One of these snippets interestingly has Chung explaining that the reason why there is no dialogue in the game is because he didn’t want there to be any time in the game where the player wasn’t in control. It’s such a perplexing statement because this is a game where you really aren’t ever in control of anything. Thirty Flights of Loving was entertaining to play through, but it would have been a better fit as a short, cinematic story rather than a game.
Links: Blendo Games