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LIFE GOES ON
Platform: PC
59

Life Goes On Review

Except when giant spiked panels are involved

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Good grief, we're really scraping around in the gaping excavation that used to be the bottom of the barrel now, aren't we? A quirky indie puzzle-platformer? Well, not long ago I would have made some kind of tired, unfunny complaint about being up to our eyebrows in quirky indie puzzle-platformers, but in recent years that particular driving force seems to have moved onto open-world zombie games and Minecraft clones, so what the hey. After all, should we not give every game a chance to surprise and delight us, no matter how unremarkable it seems on first glance or how much of the marketing budget was pilfered from pay phone return slots? I'd like to think that that's the world we live in now. Incidentally, you should join me next week when I review a student project done in Unity for some obscure game jam you've never heard of. It lasts five minutes and uses a combination of coloured blocks and stock textures to explore the bleakness of the human condition.

Life Goes On game

Anyway, Life Goes On, as today's game is quick to remind us, and quirky indie puzzle-platformers will continue to be made. The gist this time around is that you have an infinite number of small, cartoon-proportioned knights at your disposal, presumably summoned out of some kind of feudal pocket dimension with an abnormally generous percentage of noblemen, and you must strategically use their brutally mangled tin-can bodies to traverse a variety of dangerous locales. You can only ever control one knight at a time and you don't get a new one until the old one has died, so the game is based around strategically killing yourself off multiple times in order to weigh down switches, cross pits, balance levers, cash in on life insurance scams and so forth. It's a cute original concept marred slightly by me distinctly remembering experiencing precisely the same idea in a Flash game somewhere in the middle of the last decade, but whatever. Shooting zombies is hardly an original idea either, and look at how that one persists.

The game is presented as 'comically-morbid', which initially sounded appropriate to me since it's essentially a mass ritualistic suicide simulator by way of Little Big Planet, but the subject matter is swiftly tied down in a dentist's chair and de-toothed until very little of the 'morbid' remains. Between the lack of gore, the silly tone, the high-pitched squeals of dying knights, the complete absence of characterisation and the enormous colourful Acme-esque puzzle elements that populate every level, it's hard to feel that there's anything unsettling about sending thousands of identical clones to their torturous deaths. I'm not saying that there's something inherently wrong with a puzzle-platformer just because it doesn't have some kind of macabre streak to it, but a psychotic undercurrent would have really lent some character to the proceedings, and without it the whole experience feels kind of cold and empty. So I can knock a knight into some spikes then slowly wheel him through a novelty oversized Bunsen burner. What am I supposed to think of that? There's no gratification, no emotional flicker, no sense of anything being lost or even necessarily gained. Is this supposed to be part of the fun, or just a meaningless by-product? Oh, shut up and enjoy the puzzles, you over-analysing ponce.

Life Goes On game

And indeed, for a while, I did. It's hard to play Life Goes On without getting the sense that it was being stringently cross-referenced with a game design textbook throughout its development, and while that's not quite as exciting as what my history of quirky indie puzzle-platformers has lead me to believe, it's equally difficult to complain about such a thing. Puzzle elements are smoothly introduced, incorporated, reused and combined in a number of imaginative ways, like gravity beams altering the trajectory of a knight fired out of a cannon, or a conveyor belt dumping an entire cargo of corpses onto spikes in order to create a temporary walkway. Nevertheless, no game is perfect – except Leisure Suit Larry 4, obviously – and no game escapes my clutches without three or four paragraphs of entitled juvenile whining, so let's get stuck in.

Now, in the past I've often allowed games with startling brevity to slip by on the basis that they were cheap and heavily storytelling-focussed, and it's hard to stretch a game when all you have to hand is a story and a bit of light exploration. I mean, can you imagine if a film was twelve hours long? I feel sure that any audience members who hadn't already died of sugar dehydration or deep vein thrombosis would have long since offed themselves to escape the disastrously bloated plot. Life Goes On, however, is a puzzle game with the kind of plot you'd see on the back of a cereal box, so why is it still so ruddy insubstantial? I finished it in two short hours, and this was by no means an exercise in the practice of 'must blast through everything so you're able to cover yourself on the subject of the ending': I regularly searched for each level's secret – a fuzzy creature reminiscent of the User Friendly mascot – and yet I still found myself staring blankly at the desktop by mid-afternoon. What else am I supposed to do? Go back and try to beat the par scores for each level? That's entering completionist territory, and one should always be wary of striving towards such a goal when the existence of a reward has yet to be teased. Life Goes On doesn't strike me as the kind of game with a secret ending to it anyway, unless it turns out that the thousands of identical clones I sent to their deaths were actually androids or unwanted children or something equally nonsensical.

Life Goes On game

Does something here seem a bit fishy to you? Really, two hours? Was I never stuck, or confused, or just frustrated to the point of rolling my head back and forth in the cookie-crumb detritus on my desk for twenty minutes? Nope. Though the difficulty curve in Life Goes On feels carefully planned and smoothed to perfection, it's hampered somewhat by being overall about as steep as a hundred-meter long disabled-access ramp. The game only really grows a few teeth on the final stretch, and even then, its concessions to difficulty often seem to have more to do with making the levels longer than actually putting harder puzzles in them. Several times I knew the solution, but couldn't actually carry it out because I couldn't cajole the physics engine into doing what I wanted.

These are all just fairly petty nitpicks, as well you know, and all they really do is cavort harmlessly at the base of my main problem with Life Goes On, which is that the central mechanic of using endless supplies of corpses as a puzzle solution just isn't particularly noteworthy. Ultimately your dead knights are just physics objects, easily interchangeable with mattresses or enormous cubes of tofu, and as a result the puzzles never really feel like something you haven't seen before. Buttons, physics objects, environment features that manipulate those physics objects. While the game does make occasional clever uses of its mechanic, it just doesn't encourage you to think differently like the Portal gun from Portal, or the Fez from... well, FEZ. Seems like most of the popular puzzle games nowadays have some kind of time- or space-altering mechanic, and I don't imagine that's any coincidence when the remarkable spatial awareness of regular gamers is so well-documented; making people solve something they can't easily visualise is probably one of the few ways left to make a genuinely clever puzzle.

Life Goes On game

I feel that I may be giving the wrong impression here. Life Goes On is not, when all's said and done, a bad game. What it is is inoffensive, unremarkable. In a way that makes it even less worthy of discussion than a bad game, for at least a bad game offers some insight into how not to do things in the future. Life Goes On is the videogame equivalent of those grey nutrient bars you always find in a very particular brand of pulp science-fiction: guaranteed to contain everything a human body could ever conceivably need, but ultimately about as substantial and fulfilling as eating a handful of solidified poster glue. It's too short, easy and featureless to leave anything more than a feeble impression, and once finished, quickly becomes a mere passing memory. It's the kind of game that just turns up unexpectedly in your Steam list one day, either through a giveaway, as part of a Humble Bundle, thrown in with another game or as a sheer boredom purchase, and never gets installed. Not because it's necessarily bad, but because there's no reason to ever play it.

Our ratings for Life Goes On on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Presentation
57
Looks and sounds fairly generic in a student project sort of way. Still, it works, and there's something endearing about the comic sound design.
Gameplay
61
Reasonably well-designed, but the central mechanic is far less interesting in practice than it sounds, and the difficulty never really builds up properly.
Single Player
48
Not being narrative-driven is an understandable design choice, so the lack of a story can be forgiven. However, one would expect that a lack of narrative constraints would grant the game extra length, not make it woefully short.
Multiplayer
NR
None
Performance
(Show PC Specs)
CPU: Intel i7-870 @ 2.93 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 760
RAM: 8GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Premium 64-bit
PC Specs

84
Runs more or less perfectly, with the exception of some iffy invisible walls. I did get stuck in the terrain once or twice, but the comedic value of watching my little knight's animations bug out far outstripped the relative annoyance of restarting the level, so I'll allow it.
Overall
59
Barely notable enough to be worth mentioning, but a fun little outing nonetheless. I'd call it 'cheap and cheerful', but there's plenty more 'cheerful' out there for equivalent levels of 'cheap'.
Comments
Life Goes On
Life Goes On box art Platform:
PC
Our Review of Life Goes On
59%
Mediocre
The Verdict:
Game Ranking
Life Goes On is ranked #1701 out of 1953 total reviewed games. It is ranked #123 out of 152 games reviewed in 2014.
1700. D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die
Xbox One
1701. Life Goes On
1702. Stories Untold
PC
Screenshots

Life Goes On
10 images added Apr 29, 2014 20:12
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