Over the past year or so, ever since I started my podcast, I’ve offended a lot of people. My goal in creating the show seemed simple: play games that were perceived as masterpieces upon release, and try to determine if they’re truly classics. I wanted to break down everything - the graphics, the music, the gameplay, the level design - and compare it to the titles of today. I went in expecting a mixed bag of experiences - some good, some bad and some truly dreadful.
Perhaps the worst game that I played this year was Kirby’s Nightmare in Dreamland. I was incredibly dismissive of it on the show and had basically nothing positive to say about it. “It’s a game for children,'' I said, my face contorted in a nasty sneer. I was a professional gamer, and this game dared to present me a simplistic, fun and cute adventure instead of the brick wall challenge that I craved.
I was expecting people to be angry with me. I was prepared for that. Anger and insults would just allow me to counterattack with even more arrogant condescension, breaking down the game to its purely technical components. It would let me strip the game of any romanticism or artistic qualities and engage in a jargon laden barrage. But, unfortunately for me, the show, and even my article, didn’t lead to angry outbursts. The response was far worse.
It was met with sadness.
I heard a story of someone who used to struggle to sleep as a child Defeating Nightmare and restoring Dreamland to peace in game helped them to fall asleep. More commonly, I was just told of a general feeling of warmth towards the game. Nostalgia wasn’t being used as an argument for the game’s greatness, but their experience with the game was defined by it. They said that they were sad for me that I didn’t get to experience it when I was younger, and that I couldn’t understand how they felt about the game.
It made me feel uncertain. Its not that the criticisms I made were invalid. Instead, there was some kind of bigger picture interfacing issue. I’ve always been highly critical in how I approach most art, spending far more time talking about the things I dislike than what I love. But I ultimately put my concerns aside, because there were more shows to do, and no time to second guess myself.
Until recently, that is. The reason I’ve started reflecting once upon this troublesome idea is a game called Supraland. It was released earlier in April this year, but I only started playing it about a week ago. It's a shonky, amateur game, filled with physics glitches, dubious ‘writing’ and presents basically no challenge. And yet, for all its apparent flaws, I still love it. So I decided to write a bit about this game, in an effort to understand exactly why this game evokes a warm feeling in my heart. If I’m lucky, at the end of it I might just understand Kirby a little better
Supraland presents itself as a combination of Portal, Zelda and Metroid. You run around in first person, doing a bit of platforming, monster slaying and puzzle solving. As the story progresses, you unlock new combat, puzzle-solving and platforming abilities (some of which are multi-purpose), expanding your ability to interact with the world. It’s framed as a child’s elaborate toy empire - you often see him towering over the landscape.
The first thing I’d like to focus on are secrets. Secrets, by their very nature, are made to feel special. They’re not mandatory and they are deliberately hard to find. They’re only there for those paying attention, those going the extra mile. And if you search hard enough, you’re usually rewarded with coins or guns or abilities above and beyond what the main route offers. It's a juicy dialogue between you and the game developer, a treasure hunt that exists parallel to the main game.
My childhood was spent playing games like Doom and Duke 3D, where secrets were commonplace. Duke 3D, in particular, was littered with false walls and windows, crevices and jetpack-only areas. It always felt like I was breaking the game, that I was playing the game in an unintended way. Of course, that was complete nonsense - these games were meticulously designed with secrets in mind - but at the time, I delighted in their discovery.
My love of secrets took even took me to games I’d never played, or had any hope of regularly playing. I used to incessantly track the exploits of the players of High Jump Halo, a now defunct website. The group was obsessed with breaking open the game’s secrets - and not just the obvious ones, either. They wanted to break through the death barriers, reach the edges of the world, and launch tower to tower. Later, I would get entrapped in the mysteries of Shadow of the Colossus, best summarised in Jacob Geller’s video on the subject.
This is all to say that I adore secrets. And supraland does them better than almost any game I can think of. There are secrets literally everywhere. You crawl into a pipe that was spouting fire - secret. You find a hidden button, put a cube on it - secret. You spend 20 minutes awkwardly trying to jump your way up the side of a mountain, Skyrim style - you better believe that there’s a secret there.
I’m the kind of person that wastes hours climbing to high up places, for no other purpose than the joy of doing so. When I did that in Supraland, I got far more than a nice vantage point to regretfully dwell on my life’s decisions. I got a chest, with an upgrade inside - the game was acknowledging my thirst for the exploration of the unknown. But it also knows when to exercise restraint and dangle goodies out of your reach.
From the very first town in the game you’re treated to a buffet of confusion. There are glowing switches, impossible timing challenges, a paint machine with no clear purpose and areas that seem plain impossible to get to. As you gain upgrades it all starts to click together, of course, and you realise that it’s all an elaborate tease. The joy in these secrets comes from anticipation of what's to come.
It never lets up for the entire duration of the game. A lot of the fun comes from leaving the beaten path and seeing if you can reach the secrets with the tools currently at your disposal. Rarely does your experimentation go unrewarded. And when you can’t quite make that jump, or figure out how to open that door - you know that soon you’ll be able to return, and crack that puzzle wide open.
Hollow Knight is far and away my favourite metroidvania (although ESA comes close). One of its many strengths is how powerful gaining new abilities feels. When you first acquire the wall slide, or the double jump, the way in which you play the game has been fundamentally changed. Not only do theses upgrades allow you access to paths that were previously closed off to you, but they also enhance your general combat prowess and platforming flexibility.
But these upgrades are spaced hours apart. They’re separated from one another, often sitting at the extreme ends of Hollow Knight’s sprawling world, and protected by many layers of challenge. Mooks, bosses, and endless traps filled with spikes stand between you and the next upgrade, and you’ll sometimes go hours without getting a new one.
Supraland takes a different approach. It’s upgrades come thick and fast. Within the first hour of play, you gain the ability to run fast, double and then triple jump, and summon a glowing purple cube. And that’s not even taking into account the sheer number of incidental upgrades you get from secret chests and shops - damage and hp ups, armour and crit chance increases. Your character grows stronger and more versatile with every passing moment.
And with each powerup you receive, you feel your horizons expanding. There was one impossibly located chest, on top of an enormous pickaxe embedded in the ground. When I discovered the float buckle - an item that lets you levitate near metal - I returned and triumphantly floated to the top. All of a sudden, a wealth of new areas and options had opened up to me - and I immediately started abusing the power of the buckle.
By the end of the game I was combining sling-shooting, buckle-floating, speed ball-boosting and triple jumping together into elaborate chains of movement. I’d gained a mastery over the world of Supraland that was far removed from the slow crawling of when I started. Each step along the way felt satisfying because just as I was growing bored and complacent with a powerup, it immediately sent a new one my way. The game wasn’t trying to make me prove myself for hours before it rewarded me with a new toy - it wanted me to have them.
Supraland, you see, is an easy game. If you’ve listened to the show, one of my favourite parts about games is the sense of challenge that they create. It took me a while to learn, but eventually I realised that failure is an essential part of getting better at a game, and a game that repeatedly kicks you into the dirt is an experience worth treasuring. When you finally overcome that challenge, it feels incredible - and I can attest to that through my long struggles with games like Sekiro and Furi.
Supraland isn’t even remotely difficult. The ‘puzzles’ in this game are far simpler than even something like Portal, its platforming is forgiving and the combat can be slept through. The closest it gets to challenge is a stupid side quest where you have to find 6 snail shells, and even then you get rough hints as to their locations (I also got stuck in the section where the pickaxe was introduced - I didn’t realise it was anything more than a prop).
So is Supraland a bad game because it isn't difficult? Of course not - it's just a different sort of game. The point isn't to punish you for failing to make a jump, but to instead take delight when you finally do. I don't need to try to attain a state of zen in the face of lost progress, I just need to relax and enjoy the playground before me.
Nowhere is this approach more evident than in the shortcuts all over the game. There are Mario pipes connecting different areas, and boosters that take you from one edge of the world to the other. Most remarkably though, are the mini shortcuts that open up as you tackle some of the larger scale ascents. Each completed sequence activates a booster that acts as a checkpoint if you fall. It may be slightly excessive in parts, but the principled reason for it is clear - Supraland wants you to succeed.
And it doesn't feel condescending or demeaning to have the safety net, because when I sit down with the game I want to succeed as well. It's just that instead of my normal adversarial relationship with videogames, where I'm trying to defeat the game, I instead have Supraland on my team, working with me to win. Every new area smells of adventure, and I get taken right back to the imaginary and infinite worlds of when I was a kid.
I stand by the criticisms I made of Kirby's Nightmare in Dreamland. I found it vapid and uninspired. But what I regret, what I feel guilt for, is the tone of disdain and contempt that I used when speaking of it.
If I had to review Supraland in a similar fashion, I could conjure a lot of similar criticisms, about its slapped together level design and general feeling of jankiness. But I'd also emphasise how happy it made me feel. That when I switched my critical brain off, and just played, that I was having fun. When I first gained the ability to slingshot off wooden surfaces, I mentally rubbed my hands together greedily - this is exactly what I wanted! I’d always suspected that the world was my oyster, but it was only when I got this powerup that I knew it was true.
A game is more than the technical, individual bits that comprise it. When you break a game down this way, and examine each part in isolation, the final bookkeeping will often produce something unremarkable. But when taken as a whole, when you instead think about your emotional reaction and how the game makes you feel, you can get a completely different result.
Supraland isn’t a game of my childhood and doesn’t particularly resemble them. But it is evocative of the feelings I had playing games for the first time, feelings of joy and wonder. At the end of it, Supraland may not be the best or flashiest game I’ve played this year - but it was far and away the most fun.
