It's a good story but not long enough.

Review originally published at https://www.thecerebralbore.com/


Thirty Flights of Loving is a Kickstarter funded sequel to freeware indie-darling, Gravity Bone, from Brendon Chung as Blendo Games.

With the same ‘blocky’ design aesthetic to its predecessor and no dialogue, TFOL doesn’t require much of you other than walking around (W,A,S,D) and occasionally interacting with things by pressing ‘E’. It’s completely linear and barely even a ‘game’ really, with the objectives, platforming and items featured in Gravity Bone stripped out in favour of ‘the experience’.

And, on top of featuring no gameplay (as such) and zero exploration, the game only lasts about 10 minutes! (assuming it doesn’t crash). Now, I’m all for shorter games these days, but I’m talking 4-8 hours, not 10 minutes! This wouldn't be an issue if the game were free (like the last one), but it isn't.

While TFOL might be linear as far as playing it goes, the scenes are anything but, with ‘jump cuts’ every few seconds telling a out of sequence story which at least probably makes it worth playing through a couple of times (upping the run time to 15 minutes…). This isn’t something you often see in games as it’d likely be disorienting, but since you‘re not really required to do too much in TFOL, it’s not jarring in any detrimental way and adds to the games inventiveness.

And really, ‘inventiveness’ is the main thing the game has going for it. Critically, it has has been praised all out of proportion. Sure it’s different, has nice music and a unique aesthetic, but it crashes a lot AND costs money.

Variety is something the games industry is increasingly allergic to (with the cost of modern development what it is), so it’s not surprising that indie games are getting a lot attention. It’s the same with film, when you get these low budget art house movies that you wouldn’t normally watch in a million years, but they get lauded by jaded critics to the point where you think they are apparently something special …and then you watch it, and it’s just not.

I’m not saying TFOL is crap, it is undeniably a well thought out, deeply personal, evocative and provocative project, I just think the mainstream praise is all out of proportion, whereas the more conflicting user reviews out there are probably more accurate in this case.

I might change my mind in future after it has had time to settle in, I want to like it, but for now:
Is ‘Fifty Shades’ of Loving an interesting insight into indie game development? Sure
Is it a game everyone needs to play? …not really
Was it worth paying money for? No

4/10