Pitfall styled graphics coupled with SFX out of Rosemary's Baby against a backdrop of Orpheus descending into hell, and great music. The gameplay is pure timing and spatial manipulation, there's an interesting cognitive dissonance when you play and the viscerally simple mono-blot of hell, gamed out with 8-bit charisma, contrasts with a stark sense of ambiance.
What we would have here is a highly stylized, well executed throwback to the good old days before I was born - but there's something wrong. The title does not come from the running obstacle course so much as the twist at the end. All the Megaman level challenges, the horrors and retries, they amount to something not quite so pat and cliched as the usual end-of-level macguffins. In the original story of Orpheus he betrays the rule against looking back, his pre-occupation with the wife he leads out of hell keeps her away. In this version, you deal with Metroid-style circuit design on the way out where your constraint becomes moving forward without looking back. It's a good use of gameplay to tell a story, but in an existential inevitability, like the situation in Pazzon, you'll end up losing her anyway, and then you'll blink and wonder if you're playing Braid. And it'll be cool.
Tobin wrote a good review of this as well, and he seems to think there's something uplifting in the ending. I think there are at least two interpretations. One is that the inevitability of the gameplay's linear flow mimics the inevitability of death, but if we move forward without regret and enjoy the trip through hell, then that's cricket. The other is that the whole thing is just a thought loop, which it is in your brain rather than the characters (except to the extent you ware the character - whoa!). The man is staring at his wife's grave full of regret, digs deep into himself to find her amidst a hell of self-doubt and second-attempts, and then in the recovery finds his own peace.
The real question is, can a platform game with cheap graphics and a clever aesthetic really call us to question our attitudes about life, or am I way over-analyzing this? We know a maze game can. There's nothing left to do but play your way to a resting place in the heart of the world.
Orphic jumps
It's a little frustrating to realize that the usual way to make precise jumps involves using both horizontal directions to fine-tune your trajectory. So, Orpheus fighting his doubt becomes a gamer fighting their reflexes. Hmmm.
As for the thematic content, I think you covered it pretty well, so I don't have anything to add. ;)
Fun, clever, but...
...when you get right down to it, a little too on-the-nose to really succeed as anything other than a mildly diverting couple of minutes. Don't get me wrong-- on an aesthetic level it's got minimalism down to a beauty, mechanically it's tight as a drum, and in terms of expressive gameplay the Orpheus & Euridice challenge towards the end is smart and almost profound; the problem is that you get the whole message the first time you turn around, at which point it just starts over again.
The whole Euridice Moment thing is really tricky, because when the player changes direction in a game, they're not really "looking back" in a sentimental fashion-- they're doubling back just to better navigate the level. Is that saying that the impulse to look back at your lost love is analagous to trying to get a running start for a jump? Doesn't really work for me.
What makes it worse is the fact that the whole issue, and any sense of greater emotional affect it might have is wholly undermined by the fact that the game unfailingly restarts as soon as you lose the Euridice character. Granted, it's hard to imagine such a death-intensive game remaining playable for most people if losing the girl meant you had to start all the way from the beginning (although it is a short enough game that it could've concievably gotten away with it).
There's an easy compromise, though-- if you lost Euridice, you could've gone back to where you found her to start over, been forced to kill yourself to respawn with her, or simply have decided to move forward without her at all. Pretty much anything would've been preferrable to the cop-out design here.
It's really too bad, because if the game weren't so insistant on holding your hand so tightly, it could've really been interesting. But the lack of long-term difficulty keeps the player on a much shorter leash, and without any real sense of consequences it can't really rise above anything but a cute idea that flinches in its execution. It's a pop-song of a game, nothing more.
Do not waver!
I'd have to say I didn't mind its "pop song" qualities, partly because I don't have a ton of patience for platformers to begin with. I prefer to follow a story, overcoming a series of individual challenges, rather than being punished for experimentation.
Of course, in the myth the looking back Orpheus must avoid is not a sentimental or metaphorical looking back. It is literally this: he must not glance over his shoulder. And why did he look eventually? Because he doubted that his wife was still there. I actually found that the gameplay really communicated a message in that sense. I had to proceed through the puzzles without a shred of doubt. I had to be sure of my path before I even began. Any other course would lead to disaster.
Again, the disaster is short-lived. But it's there, so I get the point. Perhaps there would have been more tension if the consequences for failure had been higher, but then I probably wouldn't have played it through. Or maybe I would have examined each puzzle very carefully (as I started to on the exit) to figure out the exact timing I needed, drawing my sureness from deduction rather than experimentation. That could have provided an interesting dynamic, I admit. But some of the puzzles were beyond my ability to solve without experimentation. And experimentation means occasional failure.
It may be a pop song, but
It may be a pop song, but it´s like a Smashing Pumpkins single or something, from a concept album.