Pong and Beyond

513th played so far

Genre: Interactive Fiction
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2012
Developer: Blendo Games

Described as a first-person adventure game, I didn’t really know what to expect from Thirty Flights of Loving before I started. It’s the story of a heist, but the main thing that stood out from what I’d seen is the art style – the big, blocky heads and flat coloured, blocky surroundings.

Originally created as a reward for backers of the Idle Thumbs Kickstarter, and now for sale on Steam, the game is meant to be short but (obviously) good. I’m ready to try it.

Our Thoughts

On the surface, there isn’t much to the game. There are no real puzzles, no choices, not even loads to explore (although there are a couple of easter eggs in the game). That isn’t a problem at all – games like Gone Home, Heavy Rain and Facade have interested us in the past despite mostly leading you around a story. It does mean there’s not much to gameplay, instead focusing on what it’s trying to tell you.

The other part of Thirty Flights of Loving is that the story it tells is far more action based than those games. The others are emotional pieces, often heavy, talking about how people experience things and how they react. Here, instead, it’s about the action, the story it tells about the raid (out of order and almost completely wordless) where you draw your own connections and don’t necessarily need to feel much. Instead you get the biggest thrills of the adventure, the highlights, and enjoy them without any chance of failure.

With that, the game actually creates a more interesting story. As a fifteen minute game, it doesn’t have much time to do it, which again is where the action focus helps immensely. You don’t need a lot of context to know what’s going on, as a lot of action tropes are already involved in telling the story. Even the characters are used in a fifteen second cut scene each, just giving their jobs, immediately giving an idea of their personalities through this as well.

At that point, it’s just a run from high to high, where you get enough to know what you’re doing. You don’t quite know what the heist is for, just how you’ve done some things and the aftermath, but that’s all you really need to know.

Final Thoughts

Thirty Flights of Loving is not a game to play over and over again – there’s not much new that would be in the game – but with how short it is, it doesn’t need a lot of your time to go through and experience the game. It’s like the art – it looks simple, but there’s an awful lot put into something that seems simpler than it is, and a lot of thought has clearly been put into the game. One of those games you just have to experience.