Laserlife

Editor's Notes

Steam PC version reviewed. A 360 controller was used for the review.

Introduction

Choice Provisions was previously known as Gaijin Games and they are probably best known for their 'Bit.Trip' franchise. 'Bit.Trip' is a kind of rhythm platformer and saw a lot of releases on Nintendo consoles, where it was warmly received. 'Laserlife' is also in the rhythm genre, although it is a decidedly different beast.

The Game Itself: Our Reviewer's Take

The first thing 'Laserlife' told me upon startup was that I would need a controller. This was both interesting and mildly inconvenient, the former because this declaration is a rare occurrence in PC games in my experience, and the latter mostly because I had to find my PC controller. Controller in hand, I stared with bemusement and confusion at the 'Laserlife' menu for a while before selecting a "memory" floating underneath a dead, decomposed astronaut with his faceplate smashed out. Then the real confusion started.

The first level tossed me into the fray of 'Laserlife’s' psychedelic, undulating cadence. Dogs, fish, household objects, and otherworldly flotsam floated around the background and occasionally the foreground. Unrelenting electronic music pulsed along with little circular objects traveling towards me, often in pairs. A pair of squiggly laser beams, one teal and one beige and corresponding to the controller’s thumbsticks, were at my command. The game was light in its explanations, almost cryptic, but apparently I was to move the squiggly beams around the note path, connect with the circular things, and squeeze the triggers at the same time. The circles tended to pulse in time with the music.

I wish there was more, but except for mildly different variations of the beam and circle theme, that is the sum total of what 'Laserlife' has to offer. It is minimalist to the extreme, almost incomplete in its presentation. After the first stage, the second stage of each memory uses a flat circle and there is more up and down movement of the sticks than rotation. The third section is a tunnel of light with angry red triangles stacked on the walls, which must be avoided by the beams of light by sliding them around to openings on the side. The game informed me how I did on each button press from "good" to "perfect!", although I often disagreed with the verdict because the presses did not align perfectly with the tempo. There is also a discordant swishing noise on each press, which does not fit into the music at all and tended to make everything sound messy.

Upon completing a memory, I had to maniacally rotate the thumbsticks in all directions to give the dead astronaut a seizure, and was then rewarded with the still image of a boat or some other non sequitur and an accompanying prosaic sentence. I think that this process is somehow meant to extract memories from this skeletal cosmonaut, but what significance they hold is lost on me. There’s little story to speak of, and I’m not even sure what the player represents in this equation. Am I death? An alien graverobber? The inherent entropy of the void of space? A puzzled gamer, struggling to comprehend this mystifying game?