With Valentine's Day approaching, perhaps my mind was on the subject of love when I played Jesse Venbrux's magnet odin, "You Probably Won't Make It". It's a double-jumping platformer, and it's a lot like Karoshi, one of Venbrux's earlier games, in that you will die a lot, but unlike Karoshi in that dying is not the object of the game.
It's really just a super-hard platformer in a spike-filled environment; its "special feature" is leaving a line that shows the path you took on your previous life, which helps you line up tricky jumps. In can be surprisingly useful, for such a simple feature, and it's small decisions like that that can really give players a new way of looking at the game.
One thing I noticed, though, was that I kept expecting spikes to jump out at me, or the platforms to shift, or some other cheapass I Wanna Be The Guy shit. But that never happened; YPWMI is a very fair game. Still, having played (some of) IWBTG, I couldn't shake the feeling that the game was going to pull the rug out from under me.
IWBTG and I had a short, abusive relationship, and I mean that in all its implications (though there's obviously a tremendous difference in severity). IWBTG treated me badly, and as a result, I have trouble trusting difficult games, particularly ones in which you are a little dude with a double jump.
In much the same way, my fulfilling, supportive relationship with Braid gave me high expectations for other platformers, and left me with little patience when I felt they were wasting my time or not meeting my needs.
This comparison may sound stupid, but there's some psychological research that basically says that, when you like a TV show, your brain starts to think the characters in it are your friends, regardless of your conscious awareness that they are not. A game is a little more abstract than a TV image of a human being, but the game itself is still a playmate for the user, and that relationship creates a bond of trust that can be respected or abused.
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