Quantum Bummer Blues é um jogo bastante DENSO. Nele, você toma controle do sangue de uma prisioneira morta, e seu objetivo é escapar pelo ralo de uma prisão. O jogo tem um visual retrô e certamente busca influência de arcades.

Particularmente, eu achei a jogabilidade pouco intuitiva, foi uma experiência muito difícil, mesmo assistindo ao vídeo explicativo da desenvolvedora no Youtube. Após várias tentativas, decidi usar o coloringbook mode, e só assim consegui zerá-lo. Talvez isso tenha ocorrido por conta da minha falta de familiaridade com jogos arcade, talvez não; mas certamente afetou minha experiência, inclusive a de me interessar na história do jogo.

Um conto violento apresentado de uma forma simples que me tocou muito - eu geralmente valorizo mais a parte do "jogo" nas obras que eu jogo e ainda assim, deparado com um arcade game onde você gerencia múltiplos recursos e aumenta o seu high score, essa foi a parte que mais ficou comigo. Talvez seja por causa do quanto eles se conectam para representar a dor que você causa a si mesmo, o sangue de uma garota que se espreita pelo asilo que a mostrou o inferno, assim como ela voce fica constantemente à beira da morte. É legal perceber o quão bem isso é representado por um jogo tão curto e experimental.

Sem dúvidas, os impactos de jogar este ainda reverberarão em minha forma de intrepretar e produzir jogos. A estrutura de um antigão dos arcades é reapropriada para criar desconforto - o trilhar de seu sangue é mecanicamente e simbolicamente um ato de flagelação - para contar uma história de violência horripilante: o sangue rasteja por uma mega-estrutura abstrata construída para distorcer o que é inaceitável na polpa em que esta sociedade acredita que ela merece ser. Um ode ao jogo curto que bate pesado.

As an arcade game that blends the technical and experiential, Quantum Bummer Blues is at least as great as RayForce 😎

Heather's an absolute genius, combining the dynamic positioning of Libble Rabble and nuanced resource managment of the best Raizing games, all while tackling themes of violence and imprisonment with such purpose and clarity that they're impossible to overlook.

The core mechanics of encircling atoms and dodging turrets are so strong that they don't need stinky 'level design' to stay engaging and the narrative doesn't need explicit characterization to feel emotionally impactful

All in all, this game is a CERTIFIED BANGER

CW:Text Vomit, Excessive Gamer Tangents, Very Mild gameplay spoilers

Est. Reading length: Inchoately N/A
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I should note I got a free copy of the game from the developer because we are cautious friends. Not only for the sake of 'journalistic integrity' but also to point out that there's never been a situation where I played a game a developer gave me for free who I know personally and then I didn't like the game which is to say, I don't have a litmus test for how easy or hard I am to pay off. Who can say if I would have spoken about this game if I didn't like it? That being said the primary reason it is this way is out of poverty and not because I don't think the game is worth the money or anything like that. I definitely think with the amount of time it'll take to figure it out its totally worth it and one of the best games of the year so far.

Anyway, in respect to what everyone else has already offered on the game, I'll skip all the theming and presentation talk and just talk about the game mechanics proper. To me I feel like there's one hanging rhetorical question looming over the game design here which is the fact that it's a score attack game with a narrative. That question is something as follows: How do you make an 'endless score' game good in respect to player proficiency?

Let's take Pacman for example, Pacman is a deeply discussed point of consideration for how to design 'infinite score' games for many reasons. Heather and Matthewmatosis both have poured a lot of their own thoughts into it through DX by considering stuff like randomization, player proficiency, increasing difficulty, etc.

This is all in a good spirit, but the reality is this: You're most proficient player of pacman already knows the exact accurate array of moves, know exactly in what ways to manipulate the AI, and generally never feel like they are 'behind'. On top of this, Pacman miraculously ended up having an accidental end game that only absolute hardcore 'geek' players would have found. I can't say I've 'completed' arcade Pacman, probably almost nobody on this website can, but an ending does exist and thus the beauty of it being an 'endless' score game has dissipated. The difficulty of getting a 'higher' score for dedicated players is gone. A dynamic game has become flatlined with spreadsheets and planning over the years. This is the ideal case to. Compare this pure arcade game with something like Donkey Kong or Galaga to see followup problems. It's fairly clear from the outset what the methodology was for getting a higher score and so thus the motivation of play splits into 2 camps: Players who want to satisfy the urge to execute, and players that simply don't care. For the former it just ends up being an endurance test anyway and not much else. How good is your bladder to hold out to get a high score in a game you can't pause because that's the only thing stopping a highly proficient player to top the leaderboard in most games.

This problem with score becomes intensified immediately with home console gaming in a few different ways. For one, unlike arcade cabinets very few people are centralized and enthusiastic strangers to give enough of a shit about your new high score in Ninja Gaiden on the NES, like ok son thats great have you filed your W-2s yet? You might invite your friend over, but why would they care if they never played it before? The followup problem is that score became an afterthought in itself to 'narrative' design as well. As petty it may seem to bring it up, getting an infinite score in Kirby Adventure is insanely easy, it becomes a simple endurance test of walking to an enemy 10 feet forward, beating it up, walking backwards to cause it to spawn again and doing it ad infinitum until you're either bored or the score is maxxed. Far be that from the only game with that problem, almost every Megaman game has it too. Nobody considered it because it didn't matter, you would only put in the quarter for an arcade game under the motivation to either get further to see more of it or to get the high score. Now that the latter motivation is made defunct, the primary motivators become narrative or experiential. The artificial motivator to do it all better only exists in the minds of the player, to such an extent that it becomes brilliantly exaggerated to stuff like speedruns and no hit challenges, things that for the most part are best left up to the players to derive and find. But what about score as a motivator? What about game proficiency in itself? Without a well thought out score modifier it becomes a rather hollow and insulting piece of player motivation. One that we don't ever feel because it's lost. Our desire to care in a world that constantly churns from one game to the next makes it hard to find the appeal in it again, besides I don't need to be proficient if I can just watch what somebody else's efficiency at the game looks like. I don't need to play a soul level 1 run of dark souls I have too many games to play as it is and I can just watch Lobos Jr. do it and about 100 other things in the game more entertainingly and communally than than I did. Unfortunately, you fucked up too many times score, you have to be the least considered factor now (imprisoned). This is exactly the sort of issues that create games like Neon White, a game where score (time speed) is universally agreed to be its best asset is still its least capitalized on in comparison to its obsession with dating game narratives design and needless lore explanations, and then when you try to consider it in comparison to something like Lovely Planet (which often gets brought up in relate) the issue for that game though is the leaderboards are not global, theres time as a score in that game but its mostly for you and doesn't really 'do' much to motivate play that completing levels doesn't already provide. On a wider level I feel personally like the problem with this is that then both the designer and the player are completely out of touch with one another. Like, far be it from me to proselytize, but even though I like most games the only time I tend to feel like me and the score design are in harmony is when I'm playing absolutely silly shit like a golf game like Kirby's Dream Course or something lmao. So like, its only a score through and inverse minimization of score or time, rather than an accumulation of either in the other direction. Even when the motivator of score exists, it's only in its own minimization!

Enter then a game like, Quantum Bummer Blues, which exists within that score abandonment crisis and tries to intervene in some critical ways. The primary one is through health. Score is quite literally vital to beating the game in a way few games actually are, you have to get a threshold of score to refill your characters blood and life, if you don't give attention to it, you're not going to get very far at all. You have to care about getting a score in order to continue the narrative of the game. You can't just 'beat the game on 1 life' by evading everything it's not quite like that.

Following this, there's a deceptively high skill ceiling in the game if you work for it, it's just interesting because that skill ceiling is found mechanically through a very methodical patience with the game. You will fail and fail again, learn a sliver of gameplay information, and then repeat those sections again, different this time, with feeling. I don't want to give it all away but learning tricks for better play help you get just that little bit further. My main advice is read the how to very carefully and then after a few runs, read it again.

Next is the character feel. Early on you're going to be wrestling with the controls because the designer intentionally made the blood flow interstitial sections annoying to navigate. It's not just moving between straight lined pipes, you have to often trudge and crevice around these pixeled steps in the way. Which work to block and slow you down, the whole game is telling you straight from the get go 'slow the fuck down' and this design is reinforced by the fact you can at any time step into the pipes again to freeze the scene safely and just think about the plan of attack. In this process you'll realize that it's only those blue antagonist vertical shots that demand any sense of urgency and that going too fast and losing all your blood is what's going to kill you. Similarly the gravity feels like sludge. You fall incredibly fast and then have to push slowly upward, its like trying to control an sentient oil mine that threatens to end your run if you don't think things through.

Finally is how random it is, the green pellets and your specific situation going into each of the rooms can be accounted for in advance. Those green pellets start in the same place but start bouncing off in random directions very quickly. Meaning trying to section off 3 of them is going to be sporadic and random.

That's why it feels great when you finally piece all the mechanics together and pull off a successful run. You're fighting against the discomfort of your player character to essentially 'farm' points. But the more points you farm the higher your IV bag gets, and thus the faster the turrets spawn. You can very easily reach a situation where you're actually suffering from success and have to leave an area early. Creating these odd situations where getting rid of blood by painting half the screen as fast as and then hiding inside the red is the best move. This isn't even a mechanical spoiler because it's such a bizarre experience you won't even really be able to conceptualize how unintuitive it is until you actually see it in action. It's just a weird moment of balancing the various moving parts. It's the constant trade off of risk and reward and how awkward it all works is to great effect as a narrative device. It often switches between being slow and requiring a reasonable amount of risky movement and shooting. The pressure between moments of downtime to moments of blood bag balancing is incredible and shows that Heather has learned a lot from her thoughts on game design since she experimented with these same score based issues in her previous non narrative endless score game Endless Overdrive. The better you are doing in that game the most hostile it gets. My favorite side effect of this is that you can literally just enter and leave some rooms you don't like very quickly with no interactions at high levels of play with a full IV.

Yet ironically, hidden in this chaotic story about carceral torture is a genuine game where getting a higher score and playing it again not just feels fun but actually cathartic. The gameplay is spontaneous, methodical and has a lot of room for error but feeling satisfaction does not in itself come from getting to 1 million on the score counter. It comes from the wild proficiency and proof of ability to get there. The ability to know how to balance each of the moving parts.

One thing I had trouble bringing up and often do, is how score and game feel actually pervade and change the experience of a work because trying to do so in write ups like this borders on geometrical. As a result I often neglect to try, but that process of neglect is because of a historical and material neglect of the same. I don't have the tools for those kinds of explanations because I haven't had the access or time to hit up those books, but it creates an insecurity there. I can explain the textual ableism or depression of a visual novel just fine but descriptions of game design in itself are far more mysterious and ambiguous. In that sense the games 'ambiguity' around its design demands a special attention to it that you don't see much elsewhere.

The score itself doesn't really matter so much as hearing the squishy noises of a job well done and there's one important reason for that: The score doesn't show on the game over screen and no high score is actually accounted for outside of play. The only way you can commemorate the moment is by taking a screenshot or recording the game. The game makes the historical abandonment of score a genuine piece of its text. Sure whatever the game is about prison violence and the abuse of the young, its about queerphobia and all this stuff. Awesome, me and Heather get along for a reason there. But more importantly to me it's a manifesto about the narrative importance of those little points and what they can and should bring to gamefeel and for me, that's a much appreciated intervention I wasn't really considering. It's made this little few hour long gem almost certainly one of the best games of the year.

This is going to sound extremely panegyric to my friend but this is absolutely brilliant shit, I wouldn't expect anything less from an erudite woman who went to college for game design but it still highlights her far above just a friend or somebody we are all shaking the hand of out of some kind of academic respect. She genuinely is in a league of her own, bringing a much needed catharsis to game design, and for that I can only give a curtsey and a textvomit along with.