Thirty Flights of Loving is one of those indie games where the graphics are intentionally bad. In this world, everything is bland looking and the people are very blocky. It is strange that the controls menu specifies keys to scroll between items and use them, because I never used that feature. It isn't an adventure game like this suggests, but the gameplay is non-existent.
There's no dialogue in the game either, and no explanation of what you have to do. The story is pretty much non-existent but you somehow have to interpret it during your 20 minutes playtime (it probably doesn't last 20 mins, I wasted time trying to remap the keys).
You start in a bar with two people you can't even talk to, with no doors that you can open. On further investigation of the wall, there is a switch which leads to a hideout, and you get on a plane. The game skips and you are in a building with your partners who are wounded. You help a member to their feet and exit the door to find you are in an airport. People are flooding through the corridor and the frame-rate stutters along until the game skips again.
You wake up and go to the door, your team-mates are there with gifts. You follow them to a rooftop party. The game skips, your partner is throwing orange peel off the balcony. You do the same. The game skips. Anyway, this process continues a few more times, then you end up in a museum which has the credits represented as art, then some exhibits on an aircraft.
Somehow, this game has 88 Metascore (10 positive reviews) and it is at this point you lose faith in humanity. There was a lot of these 'art' type games/films released around this time which seemed to get critical acclaim. It seemed people think they can't feel clever or cool unless they claim to 'get it' and therefore award it high scores. But if we are honest folk like myself, we will admit it is simply pretentious crap, and it is 20 mins of your life you just cannot get back.
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I think that whether or not you'll really get much out of this depends on whether or not 1) you're open to the idea that a game being good doesn't have to be based solely on its mechanics and 2) you don't subscribe to the mindset that you need to get a certain amount of playtime equal to its cost for something to be a worthy purchase.
I personally belong to both of these camps, and I thought that this was just an incredible 15 minutes.
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Really, the "playtime must equal the cost" camp kind of baffles me. So it's perfectly alright for a short film such as World of Tomorrow to be distributed for $4, but the second a game of a similar length comes out for $5 it's a giant ripoff regardless of how good it is?
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For as long as I can remember, the chief criticism of this was that it was way too short. Knowing that I liked Gravity Bone quite a bit which was just as short, I still looked forward to playing this. And I have to say, I'm quite disappointed. The tricks employed here are cool, but nothing engaging happens at all.
cool ideas but very underdeveloped - especially wrt agency which i think this game needed a touch more of. trace amts of a sense of place in the action were there but stuff like the cart just getting pushed out of yr hands out of nowhere or the automatic drinking at the wedding took away from that without saying much of interest wrt said lack of control. like there is a sort of recollective aspect that i think is clearly established nd these characters r vaguely compelling but i really don't understand Why it's choosing 2 do all those jumpcuts etc except for the sake of feeling sort of interesting. environments r a little too stale