Universal Review
Brick Dangerous
by J Nash (November 24th, 2010 at 9:33 am)
Game: Edge. Publisher: Mobigame. Authors: Matthieu Malot (design), Romain Gauthier, Simon Périn, Richard Malot, Jérémie Périn (sound), David Papazian (code). Price: £1.79/€2,39/$2.99. Buy the game.
I’ve been gathering a slow education about famous iThing games in order to avoid too many howlers born of ignorance. It’s a heck of a task that’s taking ages, because according to official figures there are fifty million thousand hundred pop culture titles and at least 12 good ones.
Today: Edge. And the problem with Edge is that it’s too inventive.
The foundation is (a-ho) solid: you roll a cube around isometric levels solving occasionally fussy puzzles of the stand-here-push-button-path-opens type in order to reach the exit and (optionally) find all the map’s gems. By juggling the buttons you can suspend precariously from adjacent blocks by your leading edge and thus be swept by moving scenery over otherwise impassable gaps.
Exemplary presentation extends to the way you can spin between portrait and landscape via an in-game pinch, the static camera that discreetly zooms in and out at certain points for dramatic effect without ever cutting off the action (you’re never taking a roll of faith) and the many and mostly post-trap checkpoints.
(You have infy lives but can play against the clock for a bonus rating. The final three of the 46 levels are locked until you find every gem on every map, some of which are deviously concealed.)
The game’s entirely justified in having four people on sound; the music is all smooth crystal and there are a couple of tracks that’ll have you thinking you’re playing a missing Atari cabinet. Also, the thwock-thwop of your moving cube is one of the top spot effects; you won’t even notice its reassuring heft except that you always know in a tricky timing puzzle when you’ve taken a step.
The trouble comes when the designer gets bored with amusing you, so starts to amuse himself.
Your chief ally in Edge is the button. If you’re trapped in a dead end, and there are no moving blocks to grab a lift from, and you’ve satisfied yourself there’s no perspective trick disguising a background path (you quickly realise why there’s a permanent mini-map in the corner) then you hunt around for a button and sit on it.
Presto! A staircase appears, or you’re taxied away, or a mobile ledge unrolls itself past your lap. Or you swing between two buttons to drive a gondola. Or you become part of a giant robot. It’s a blocky delight of imagination.
The thing is, sometimes the buttons betray you. There’s the basic click-and-die type (a block pops out behind you, knocking you instantly off the map, etc); there are taxi ledges that suddenly swerve away or drop you in the soup, or when you wait suspiciously to see if they’re going to swerve away or drop you in the soup they zoom off irretrievably having expected you to blithely ride them.
The first time this sort of thing happens — a broken wall glides into view and you realise you have to hop back and forth on your flying slab to fit through a series of cube-sparing holes — you chortle at the sly wit. The nineteenth time you press a button and (unlike the one before last which insta-killed you, and the one you just passed that extended an ordinary ledge) it springs out a path that rearranges itself to death when you’re halfway across, frost begins to develop.
When you fly a giant robot and have to do nothing or die, then fly another giant robot and if you don’t do something you die, you are wearied and saddened.
Edge lacks that vital component of a game: trust. It’s fine to have a button that helps you, and another button that kills you. The problem is having a button that can do either and the only way to know which is to remember from the last time you pressed it.
(To be fair, unless you’re playing for the full 46 levels, ie going back and finding all the hidden gems, you won’t have to be disappointed more than once by each trap, except for those where the checkpoint is atypically before the ploy again. But you’re not going to shrug off your multiple unguessable dooms.)
My guess is that Edge slipped away from the designer without anyone noticing. The sheer variety of things this game can do with a bunch of unshaded blocks is amazing — this is real 8-bit-cum-dawn-of-the-coin-op freestyle, before anyone knew the marketing department was supposed to be in charge.
But the design has no consistency of play — press this button and you live, press that identical button and you die; and no matter how elegantly spectacular the death, wonder can’t mask aggravation. We all know the entertainment roulette of the self-indulgent “concept review.” Edge is a concept game. I’m glad I bought it (tellingly, in a 59p sale) and I’m glad I now don’t have to do anything more than admire its unedited creativity.
Laaaaangdellllll!!
I’m almost afraid to try this game out again. When it first appeared pre-Langdell Stupid Era, it was a real breath of fresh air—a stylish, Marble Madness-style time-attack game. Oddly, I don’t remember the Rick Dangerous elements at all. The game therefore sits in my nostalgia wagon, alongside Frenzic and Sneezies, awaiting the arrival of Mr. Reality Check.
Frenzic is still ace. :-) Sneezies has always been a bit of a luck-rather-than-skill game, but is colourful and fun. And I still like Edge – so all three have stood the test of time for me…
Why does this message board suggest the American spelling of ‘colourful’? Grr.
I always liked Frenzic, but I know Stu hates it with a passion. I’m not sure I’d like it quite as much these days, but I always saw it more as a risk/reward game (building lives), whereas he hated the random element. Sneezies has gone way down in my estimation, but I’ve no idea about Edge. Maybe I should try it and see.
As J Nash would say: CLIFFHANGER!