Games Worth Talking About - Redder

Anna Anthropy's Redder grabbed me from the first screen more strongly than anything I've played since Knytt. To anyone who has played both that may not be surprising. The two games share many similarities: they both focus on exploring a strange, alien landscape and while both games have danger in the form of enemies, neither allows the player to fight, only to evade.

But Anna's game has a brilliant puzzle mechanic that really makes it stand out. It involves the simple activation of green or red switches, which swap green and red solids on and off. Only one color can be active at a time, but the solids can serve both as walls to impede progress, or as platforms to allow access to new areas. Even more impressive, the on/off status carries between screens, so switches can literally have far-reaching implications.

The end result is a game that unabashedly shows a devotion to design. Anna said herself that the goal was not to 'gate' the player with power ups required to move to new areas, like double jumping. It both makes the game simpler to approach and vastly more complex to design.

*This next part contains some big spoilers, and since you owe it to yourself to play this game, GO AWAY and come back later. You've been warned*

All the above makes for a pretty great game, but Redder has one more major surprise. Maybe halfway through the game, graphical glitches begin to appear in the form of incorrect tiles appearing on the maps. I honestly thought it was a bug at first, perhaps caused by leaving the game running all night on my work machine (what was I thinking, my flash game overheated?). But continue collecting the crystals you're searching for and the maps continue to deteriorate. As your near the final three crystals (which are even marked as red on the map screen, as if you really are overheating) the game begins to look like this:

But the image isn't still. Those faulty tiles change constantly, the whole appearance of the map shifts second by second. Moreover, the music begins to stutter and slow, the sound effects become simpler. It gets more and more frantic until the final crystal when the game reverts to this:

What was I expecting happen when I grabbed the final crystal? I can't remember now, but when I saw this is was perfect. The game deconstructs itself down to it's most basic elements. Down to the level at which nothing is left except design. For me this final act, beginning far at the bottom of the map, was wonderful. It took maybe 10 minutes to trek back to the planet's surface (if you could even call it that now) and finally to my ship, reduced to a great color-shifting rectangle.

The journey upward is like pilgrimage to some game design Mecca, where every screen is a lesson. By now the player has been through all of them multiple times, but now it feels less like playing a game and more like walking through a temple. It was great.

I've always admired Anna Anthropy's love of design and the energy and attention she gives it in her games. Sometimes I think a lot of designers allow design to be a somewhat automatic process, pulled mysteriously from within. Here is someone who really works at it, to her benefit.