Ludum Dare ran another of its mini events a few days ago, and the theme designers had to work to was 'Fear'. Coming so soon after 'Alone' in the main competition, it’s another rather broad topic, and it’s inspired some interesting results. One of my favourite entries is a game by Grobitbox. It’s simply called RUN.
What might happen if Guillermo Del Toro and Adam Saltsman collaborated on a WarioWare micro-game? RUN feels a decent attempt at an answer. It’s minimalist and immediate, and yet it’s filled with a kind of prickly tension that only comes from games about pursuit.
In RUN, it’s your task to try and escape from an encroaching swarm of black, fly-like particles, which appear to consume all they touch. Grobitbox’s latest is a top-down affair, and the twist is that, unlike most chase games, you won’t be heading in a straight line. Instead, you have to work your way through a seemingly random arrangement of rooms, moving, for the most part, instinctively - and hoping you don’t find yourself facing a dead end.
There’s a hint of Canabalt in here, in part due to the breathless premise, but also because of the monochrome art and the quick shift between death, epitaph, and restart. There’s also a surprising amount of general survival horror design, from the awkward, twitchy controls, to the strange little grubs you come across as you explore. They won’t kill you, but they will slow you down as the nameless wall of death gets closer and, at times, that feels much worse.
RUN’s masterstroke, though, comes with something every Silent Hill veteran will recognise immediately: your view of the game space is extremely limited, making it hard to spot the exit – and sometimes even the surrounding walls – of the room you’re currently racing through. It’s an old trick, perhaps, but it’s a brilliant one, and the constant sense of disorientation RUN creates works well with the time-pressure elements of the design. You’re caught, in essence, in a mean-spirited loop: you must move quickly or die, but if you move too quickly, you’ll lose track of where you’re meant to be going.
Does RUN inspire genuine fear? Not really, but that’s a fairly big ask when you’re playing a browser game on Kongregate on a sunny Friday morning. What it does do, though, is transport you somewhere weird and oppressive and darkly exciting. It offers a series of very familiar mechanics, but turns them into something that feels a little different. For two days’ development work, that’s not a bad outcome at all.