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Review: Canabalt

Lisvender reviews Canabalt…

Available on iPhone and as a Flash game for web and Flash capable devices.

I thought that Gamespot was being pretty edgy when they picked the fringe title Demon’s Souls to win their Game of the Year award, but then I thought, “Wait! They still got it wrong!”

Canabalt should have won it. It’s a simple game: you run, and you jump, and that’s it. You don’t even press anything to run. You touch anywhere on the screen to jump. It was the best game of 2009.

This is just my opinion, you know. You should know that my personal video game Hall of Fame is full of weirdos like Canabalt. My favorite game of 2007 was Shark! Shark! for the Mattel Intellivision, a precursor to PopCap’s Feeding Frenzy. My favorite game of all time is Total Carnage by Midway, which is  an ultraviolent shooting game that can be played from start to finish in an hour. The only GOTY in there that swims with the hype-currents is Fallout 3, though I’m only talking about the original game: the out of the box  version without none of the vestigial DLC tainting it. It excels all on its own, though it’s a tad easy.

The fact is that every time I start playing Canabalt, I have a hard time stopping. It’s a game that doesn’t end until you die, and then, all you have to do to start playing again is  touch the screen. There is no loading or screen transition; the game simply starts again and you play it some more.

When you start playing, a little man in a business suit appears in a hallway in a tall office building. He runs to the right, crashes over an office chair and a box, and then plunges out of the window. The game world is bleakly gray. Its limited shades make the game look like it should be on a first-generation Game Boy. The little guy lands on the rooftop of a neighboring building and continues running to the right. Soon he runs out of rooftop to run on, and you, the player, must make him jump so he doesn’t fall. You simply touch the screen to do this. The longer you touch the screen, the higher he jumps. As the little man lands on successive rooftops and continues his dash, his speed increases, and it becomes trickier to keep him under control. Your job is to keep him from dying for as long as possible. On some tries you’ll succeed at this for a long time. On other tries you’ll last only for a few seconds. The game is randomized, so there’s no memorization allowed here. Your only assets are your reflexes.

Canabalt has no real story beyond what is shown during play. The game’s background shows a skyline with weird, enormous figures stalking about, plumes of smoke rising, and spacecraft zipping by at high speeds. Combined with the player-character’s insane rooftop run, the backgrounds make it clear that something terrible is happening here. Backgrounds in video games are powerful things, and it’s sad that 3D games, with their dynamic cameras, can’t really capture that bystander effect the way that 2D games can. Games like Half-Life 2 have tried, but they always have to contrive some kind of barrier, like a grumpy policeman or a line of rocks, to corral the player and hold them away from the sights they’re not meant to touch. Canabalt’s story is not entirely clear, of course, but it doesn’t have to be, and that’s what makes it so great. There is no text explaining what’s going on or why your character is motivated to leap across a series of rooftops. That’s left up to your imagination, where it’s sure to be more exciting than anything a programmer could dream up.

On random occasions, while playing Canabalt, you might hear a thump. That means, “Watch out, because a volatile chunk of metal is going to crash into the next building.” Touch that volatile chunk of metal, and your little guy blows up. Sometimes the buildings in your path are so tall that you can only make it through them by jumping precisely through a narrow window. There are boxes strewn about on some rooftops that will slow your little man down if he crashes into them, and sometimes you might want him to crash into them, either because you want to keep him at a reasonable speed, or because jumping the boxes will screw with your rhythm. Sometimes the building you’re running across will crumble beneath your feet, leaving you only a sliver of time to clear the next gap. None of these environmental features are preset. They just appear sometimes. There are some players who despise this kind of randomness in games. I eat it up. You see, I don’t dig “performance games,” games that require hours of practice to play perfectly, the way a complex song demands practice from a musician. Mirror’s Edge, probably the only game that can be fairly compared to Canabalt, is a performance game. Its levels require time, memorization, and a multitude of player deaths to master, and while I’m sure that skill is involved in completing it, it seems to me that players would benefit more from patience and perseverance. Any game with level design is going to require some memorization to master, but when the game becomes less about playing around and more about performing well, you might as well give it up and start playing Dragon’s Lair. Given the choice between playing Dragon’s Lair and playing Tetris, I’d pick Tetris any day.

There were a lot of good games out this year, and it might seem strange that I would prefer to play a 2D, one-button, sprite-based iPhone game over something like Uncharted 2. The fact is, though, that I really do play it more than any other game that came out last year. I think it’s because Canabalt excels at the few simple things it does. Its 2D, sprite-based graphics are sharp, evocative, and tell a fascinating story. Its single control functions flawlessly, making possible a wide range of jumps to deal with the game’s obstacles. Most interestingly, it doesn’t end; it cannot be won, and it’s only finished when you’re finished with it. It is not a game that you can consume and then put away. There are leaderboards, if you consider getting a high score to be a manner of winning, but you’re not thinking about them when you’re in the heat of the run. In Canabalt, all that matters is the game, and its many, many thrilling moments of unscripted death-defiance which change every time you play. I don’t know when we’re going to get another game like this; you’d better start playing it now.

Controller1.com rating 3/3

- Lisvender