I’ve never been an AVGN fan, but there’s one quote from his Ninja Gaiden review that rings in my ear whenever I try something difficult: “Unlimited continues means no Game Over. Game is only over when you make it over!”. It doesn’t just pop into my head when playing difficult games, it can be anything; it’s a recurring reminder that sometimes the only thing standing in my way is a lack of commitment. Mistakes are fine, just take a step back, readjust, then move forward again with a renewed sense of determination. As silly as it sounds, it encapsulates a lot about the basic human condition, of coming up against challenges, and surmounting them even when things feel hopeless.

In Atomic Runner, you can’t take a step back. Literally, you have no way of moving left, it’s a shoot ‘em up platformer where you can only run to the right side of the screen, or stay stationary until the screen scrolls you backwards. So, if you take a step too far towards a hazard, you have no way of correcting that mistake and will die every time. There are also limited continues. I don’t want to imply that this is a slap in the face to the human condition itself…

So I won’t say that. I won’t say that the way Atomic Runner structures its challenges stands against the noblest impulses of mankind, because that would be overly dramatic. In fact, a lot of its difficulty is essentially the same as Ninja Gaiden, where the mechanical complexity is minimal, but the requirement to choreograph your path through a stage is high. You need to know where every enemy is going to spawn, where every uniquely-scripted enemy path leads, whether to go under or over certain obstacles, where bosses are going to drop in, and be able to string all that knowledge together flawlessly. Weirdly enough, this is where the game’s generous checkpoint system actually makes things more difficult. Deaths never revert much progress, which seems like a blessing, but it leads to a lot of lucky breaks and situations where the stage is only cleared thanks to chance. After running out of continues and reaching that challenge again, you might as well have never seen it before, since the circumstances were so different and you never had a chance to learn. It’s almost specifically engineered to ensure you don’t grow from each challenge, not letting you stop to analyze the situation and not letting you practice it repeatedly for future runs. All of this might even be fine if the enemies weren’t so tightly scripted, behaving in ways specific to their location within the stage rather than according to their type. Most of the running robot enemies will sprint straight at you, but some are set to jump from the ground to a platform then back down, some ignore platforms altogether… it’s impossible to know until you just see and memorize each specific enemy, unlike the predictability of Ninja Gaiden’s cast. Combining that with the inability to freely move your character, or even turn around without pressing another button first, makes for a painfully stilted challenge that doesn’t even feel that satisfying to finish.

Of course, I did finish this game, even after reading a bunch of people from all over the internet saying they were unable to do so. To any of you reading this, I would like to assure you that really, this game isn’t worth getting too emotionally invested in. If you hit a wall and quit, it’s not because of you, it’s because the challenge is implemented so poorly, in spite of how cool it seems at first. Again, some people might say that it’s even so poor that it feels like it’s designed to smother humanity’s finest instincts to learn and grow in the face of adversity...

...but of course, I would never say that.

Addendum: This was a game added to my suggestions list by user JaxMagnetic, who recommended it on the basis of “so more people can feel my suffering”. Congratulations, you did it, I suffered just like you wanted. But since the game shows as “shelved” on your page, I still formally absolve you of needing to finish it. It might have the fun music and visual charm of early Genesis titles, but… it’s just not worth suffering for. You’re free now, you can now go play some more Alien Soldier instead.