Monday, February 8, 2016

Game Reviews: Give Up 2

Give Up 2 (I don't see a first game anywhere) is a borderline case of those "experimental platformers" I've talked about on a number of occasions. (It's also a little bit gory; watch out for the bloodstains and the dismembered stick people.)


Basically, in service of the painfully hard side that games like this often have, rather than having a large number of unique stages this game has a small number of basic stage designs that have an ever-increasing number of very lethal obstacles added on. Now, as with most flash games, there's no actual life system; the game would be unplayable for most if it did. (Check out the death counter-572.) This makes the game technically about learning routines; jump here when this happens, and so on, with a new thing to remember added on every time you reach the goal.

I... actually have a hard time believing I got through the first area and haven't gotten through the second; the first area was much more based on reflexes than the second, and as I've noted many times, I kinda bite at reflex gaming.

Regardless of all that, the truly great thing about this game isn't the gameplay, which is pretty basic everything-can-kill-you platforming once you get past the interesting level design. What makes the game great is the voicework.

You see that "Oh you'll feel that in the morning!" at the top of the screenshot? There's a computer character in the game who watches you the whole time and taunts you every time you die and periodically the rest of the time. The lines are delivered with so much obnoxious cheer that it's hard not to invest oneself in trying to get through, if only to try to shut him up. And every now and again one of his comments will offset the anger you're feeling, rather like the death cries in Yeah Jam Fury.

This is definitely one of those "play until you get frustrated, then go ahead and quit" games, but in this case I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that. It's kinda right in the title.

-Signing off.

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