The Impossible Game/Red Stripe Light

Game: The Impossible Game, FlukeDude, 2010, iPhone
Beer: Red Stripe Light, 11.2 fl. oz., 3.6% abv
# of beers consumed during play: 3
Level Reached: Haha, level...right.
Level of Intoxication: Woozy

Game
Impossible. As a singular term, even without all-important context, the word "impossible" is imposing. It is a word which suggests the subject in question is not only difficult, but wholly insurmountable. Many gamers have, in the throes of frustration, declared one game or another as impossible, even when it isn't. Many of these outcries were at the helm of games from the highly venerated 8-bit era, when games were true tests of fortitude and endurance, yet still not quite impossible. Fitting then, that a game which is actually titled "The Impossible Game" would so unapologetically recall those bygone days of gaming yore. Oh, and just for the record, The Impossible Game isn't really impossible, it's just really, really, really hard.


Gameplay
The Impossible Game, created by independent (or "indie" if you insist on sounding cool) developer FlukeDude, is an old-school platform game which originally saw release on Xbox Live and which was recently ported to the iPhone. The Impossible game (from here on out referred to as TIG) is deceptively simple; all you do is make a little orange box jump over stuff. The first few jumps are the "tutorial" after which shit becomes real with a heretofore unprecedented level of expedience. In the main game there is only one level, others can be either be purchased or unlocked through play. While one level sounds paltry, even by mobile standards, let me assure you that in the case of TIG, one level is plenty. During gameplay, the player controls a small orange box which is always moving along at what can only be described as Ludicrous Speed. Obstacles present themselves in a few simple forms: black boxes which kill when collided with, black ground which will kill when landed upon, and black spikes which kill when collided with or landed upon. The fact that all the elements in this game that kill you are black is either a meaningless coincidence tying into the art direction of the game, or seething social commentary from a game designer who unwittingly found himself walking through the wrong neighborhood at dusk and translated his experiences into a game that's harder than a jigsaw puzzle in an amputation ward. Since Wikipedia is unable to offer any insight, and because my life is boring, I'm going to assume the latter for fun.

When I say this game is hard, I'm not just being a pansy. This game was designed to do one thing, cause players to explore the limits of survivable frustration while simultaneously creating and adding completely new foul words to their particular national language. Judging by how many perfect playthroughs there are on Youtube, I'm confident that someone out there spontaneously coined the filthy term "scumpmuffin" at some apex of personal distress. This in itself is a noble thing in my opinion, if nothing else, this game can lay claim to being at the absolute forefront of the Shakespearean curve. Of course, I'm confident even The Bard himself would have thrown his iPhone against the wall after his 874th attempt to jump over those goddamn triple spikes. Also, I'm taking suggestions as to what people think scumpmuffin actually means, because I'm sure whatever the internet people come up with, it's gotta be funny.


If it could not have been inferred by now, the crux of the game relies on memorization and insane amounts of repetition to succeed. The level never changes, the pace never changes, the music never changes, and when you die, you go all the way back to the beginning of the level, where you are tasked with doing everything over again. This works as both a punishment and a reinforcement as the player, having gotten further along than ever before, will (literally) run into something new and unexpected, scream curses to the gods, and immediately attempt the level again. The weirdest thing is that through some miracle, this style of gameplay can not only be fun, but routinely gives way to triumphant glee. The feeling of elation that comes with finally surmounting a spike or jump that has been dogging you for the past 3000 attempts is so cathartic and encompassing, it feels like a drug and you will subsequently ride that high for the .03 seconds it takes for you to die at the next unexpected challenge and be dumped back at the beginning of the level, crushed and demoralized.

On the other hand, if you are the type of person who must graduate through progressive levels of testicular fortitude, the game offers a practice mode which allows you to place flags at any point in the level. These flags act as an instant spawn point, meaning that upon death, instead of being whisked away to the very start of the level, you are instead thrown back to the flag. This makes learning the level much easier, but also signals to every one of your gamer friends that you're the kid who buys a new game, takes it home and before ever playing it for the first time, goes into the options and turns the difficulty down to easiest. You know who you are.

Graphics/Sound
The graphics in TIG are very simple. Featuring only a handful of colors, a striking art style, and clean, well defined lines, this is one of the few games that truly embraces the "graphics over gameplay" argument. The box you control is quite orange, and the obstacles in the level are all black. The level itself has a cool blue/turquoise gradient, making both your bright orange square and the black obstacles clearly stand out. Because of the pace and style of gameplay, this convention in art direction is not only smart, but crucial. If the game field was cluttered up with meaningless graphics, effects and other nonsense, the game would be much harder to decipher and more unfair (and not-cool) deaths would result. As with Tetris, the graphics serve only to convey the gameplay, and instead of getting in the way of the interaction, actually facilitate it, enriching the game as a whole and lending some much-needed credence to the notion that while ten bazillion polygons with pixel shaders looks pretty, it does not guarantee a good game.


The sound is similarly minimalist, there are only two real sound effects in the game, and to be perfectly honest, you will really only concern yourself with one of them. That of course is the sound of your fragile orange box exploding. Over and over. That single sound will become etched into your brain, it will consume you, and after enough deaths, will eventually become the sound of comfort. It will be familiar, every nuance of its frequency and modulation will become known to you, and when you miss a jump or fall onto a bed of waiting spikes, a gentle smile will crease the edges of your mouth, for you will soon be reunited with your old friend, StupidOrangeBoxDeathExplosionHaha.wav, and as the music abruptly stops and your cube disintegrates in a shower of radial sparks, you will knowingly reflect upon the transitory nature of life. Or you'll rage and throw your iPhone over the nearest building. Either one is a perfectly acceptable response.

Also very worthy of mention is the music that goes along with each level. The main level is guided by a song called Fire Aura, which was composed by a talented chap known as Kid2Will. The song itself is more than a little infectious if your musical proclivities happen to include Electronica, with a good driving beat layered with rising anthems and a very sharp main hook. Long after you've put the game down (with varying levels of force depending on how frustrated you are), you will find the song looping in your head, partly because it is so distinct and well-composed, and partly because you've heard it a thousand or more times and it has successfully drilled down to your brain stem and started pumping for oil.

Story
The problem I'm having with reviewing iPhone games is that very few of these things have any story or plot that is even worth mentioning. As is the case then with TIG, there is no story whatsoever...nothing. You can't even really make one up that sounds cool, although because this section can always use some padding, I'll do my best.

The Orange Square has to go rescue his girlfriend, famed polyologist Purple Circle from the Green Octagon Gang, who have placed a host of obstacles in the Orange Square's way to slow his progress as they get Purple Circle to tell them everything she knows about the dreaded Tomb of the PolyGods, final resting place of the legendary Megagon, the million-sided polygon who was rumored to have bent all of geometry to his will, and whose dusty remains are said to safeguard the fabled ring of Torus, the unlocker of the Third Dimension.

Okay, so that's pretty damn cool...FlukeDude, if you're reading this, I'm totally available if you want to collaborate on a sequel.

Beer
Red Stripe Light is a Jamaican beer. I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere, so I'll just throw a bunch of words out there and see what sticks; Cool Runnings, lazy, dreadlocks, Bob Marley, marijuana, feelin' irie, British colonization, and/or backup vocalists in popular R&B songs of the late 90's.

Okay, perhaps that was needlessly cruel on my part, but this will more than make up for it. Red Stripe's advertising campaign is so ingenious, so simple, and yet so over the top, this beer almost wins by default. Their slogan is simply "Hooray Beer!" and really, as far as beer slogans go is just about the best advertising slogan ever devised. Ever. In my opinion it is the equivalent of the first cavemen ever to discover fire standing up, pointing at the flames and saying "Hooray Survival!" The slogan itself is perfectly distilled to the simplest possible terms, it is literally exactly what I think every time I open a fresh beer. Couple that with an unabashed Jamaican stereotypical spokesman juxtaposed against the whitest whiteys middle-America could cough up, and you have a series of 30-second spots that have more intrinsic entertainment value than most half-hour-long sitcoms and makes what is a typical beer stand way out of the pack. No small feat.

Smell
The initial odor is very spartan, not unlike any other light beer that may have been inhabiting the cooler alongside Red Stripe. Under the extremely average surface however, there's just the teeniest twang of roasted...something. Seeing as how this beer is Jamaican and proud of it, I have a few theories as to what that Roasted Something might be, and really, none of those theories are anything I want to drink. Further under the hint of undefinable roastiness is a sweetness I had to press the bottle up against my nose to detect. This might sound needlessly pedestrian (and a little disturbing) but after my initial sip I was vindicated in my perseverance.

Taste
Bam! Sweetness. Not the kind of earbending sweetness that one would routinely associate with a bottle of flat Smirnoff Ice or of a Shirley Temple marathon played all weekend at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, but the kind of sweetness that is a common thread with many lower tier lagers. It is that sweetness that screams "we threw a bunch of malt in here, not for the sake of taste, but because malt is cheap, we needed something to pad out the brew, and we were all out of dreadlocks and rat poison." Yes, these are the exact kind of thoughts I get when I drink a new beer. That's why I usually drink at home, so I don't inadvertently make an ill-advised comment in the wrong bar, and also because I have an unusual (and slightly self-endangering) habit of ordering Irish beers in Scottish restaurants. Don't ask. Aside from the sweetness, the roastiness reemerges as a taste, and actually isn't as bad as I would have anticipated. The whole experience is tied together with that all-too-familiar grainy, hoppy lager taste, and actually, when one considers that this is one of the few commercial exports from Jamaica that you can't smoke, isn't half bad.

Intoxication
The intoxication is a strange one. There is very little physical intoxication, particularly in the first three or so beers, but at the bottom of the very first bottle one is beset with a mental state that can only be described as addled. In playing what is admittedly a very difficult game, I notice my coordination and concentration is instantly reduced. I'm dying in ridiculously early portions of the game, and what's more, I'm laughing about it. I'm not laughing because I'm genuinely entertained by watching my little orange box explode, rather the laughter is an effect of the alcohol. It stems from a bitter realization that life is tragically short and--much in the same way one laughs at a truly terrible movie when forced to sit through it--through whatever path brought you to this point, your current actions only serve to make it shorter. Also, and perhaps because of the previous point, I find my attention divided. One moment I'm working on trying to get my orange box over a set of three spikes and the next--oh cool, Fringe is on!

I blame the beer.

Feel
Red Stripe Light is somewhat intriguing in the fact that while it has a fairly high bubble content, once nestled within the body proper, it takes on a leaden quality, one that makes me really not want to do anything but sit on the couch. I'm not exactly riddled with the desire to swallow fishing weights, and when an FDA-approved substance makes me think that I've just flown mouth-first into someone's tackle box, I usually decide not to venture that way again. What really unnerves me about RSL is that despite being a sharply middling brew, and one that I take less and less pleasure in trying each time, I've actually bought and consumed more sixers of this than all but my most favoritest of brands.

Yes, I said "most favoritest." Piss off.

The point I'm trying to make is that for reasons I'm not able to explain, this stuff sneaks its way into my kitchen. Interpret that as you like.

The Matchup
So here it is, the wrap up, and what can I say about this little venture? The game is one of those rare few that can actually cop to the "graphics over gameplay" moniker, that all the energies of the game are dedicated to providing a sharp gameplay hook that sinks deep into the player's brain and refuses to let go. This fact in and of itself pretty much means the game is going to have enough substance to elicit a thumbs-up from me. The beer in this case is another of those that is really not bad, but isn't nearly super awesome either, and so if you want to drink a middling beer in a "short ugly bottle" you can stop searching. If that was ever a specific goal for you, then I need you to email me and tell me about your taste in the opposite sex, because I get the feeling it'll be hilarious. Anyway, at the end of the day, the game is great bordering on classic, and the beer is...well, it might be the closest anyone ever gets to a Jamaican, and for that I feel a furtive thumbs up is in order.

Cheers/Game on.