Glumbuster

In this world of alienations, in this age of sorrow, we could call do worse than to call a Glumbuster. Lovingly crafted in Game Maker, this game is the apex of four years of work by an individual whose only goal is to reduce the amount of mental anguish in this world, primarily through the game, and then via donations to a children´s foundation that the game solicits.

Many compared this title to Kyntt or Seiklus, which seems appropriate on the surface. All three are platformers with no GUI and a premium on aesthetic immersion, the quiet of the scrolling parallax backgrounds, the patter of little jumps. However Glumbuster´s gameplay has a contour that makes it stand out, and one could argue that the game is about the duality of human consciousness. Each chapter is actually linearized, the first half on a single-screen, room-by-room basis, while the second half seems like your typical Metroidvania deal but is also linearized, though you must discover how.

What Leingang is trying to achieve here as far as I can tell is platform game as gestalt, where the actions of calculated moves melt away to the psychological bend of backgrounds folding into each other, most notably in a sequence of trees going through the seasons, where each successive room shows the prior trees stacked toward the vanishing point in alternately odd angles. This fails in some instances, where the level design is somewhat confusing and the flow disturbed by constipated retries -- bringing up the issue of a medium working against itself. But none of that matters when the particle effects wash over you and the quiet chirping in your soul flutters into song, I know that sounds crazy but you´ve got to play this and see what I mean. The first half of each chapter has you playing the light version of a man displaced from his family on a glum day, floating as if in a dream, and the second half grounds you as the dark version of this ego, now trapped in a world of desaturated colors. This is possibly a more profound exploration of duality through level design than all those figure and ground puzzle-platformers that came out last year. You may find it´s a profound exploration of yourself, if only to see where the glum goes. I don´t know if a game can be a good example of the redeeming qualities of the human spirit, but Glumbuster is a humbling attempt.