by Perfection is a tricky thing in video games, and perfection is what BIT.TRIP RUNNER (or, BTR) demands of you. The best way I can describe this is by saying that BTR feels like an arcade machine; but it feels like an arcade machine that was designed to eat your quarters rather than to be fun (even though there are no lives and no Game Over-s). It attracts you with colorful lights and interesting sounds tied together by a well-thought-out pixel art aesthetic. There is a simple control scheme – press space bar to jump and use the arrow keys to execute maneuvers while the screen scrolls ever forward toward the finish line. It seems straightforward and quite possibly fun.
The problem arises that in BTR, any failure means restarting the level. The levels are short enough that this isn’t an immediate problem, but as the difficulty ramps, you find yourself playing the exact same parts of levels for 90% of your time to try the tough bits 10% of the time. This just becomes grinding, since the levels require the exact same set of inputs to get to the point where you failed before. Aside: there are technically alternate paths for brief sections, but those alternate routes give you no advantage so there is no reason to memorize them.
To figure out why this is a problem, I’d like to talk about perfection for a bit.
Perfection
Let me be up front: I think games that demand constant perfection are taking shortcuts to difficulty and are generally not worth my time. Take Dark Souls or Legend of Grimrock II, for example. Dark Souls does not require perfection. It asks for excellence and an understanding of the rules, but it lets you make mistakes, and few mistakes (well, except in Blighttown) are immediately fatal. I think this design philosophy becomes clear when, in the progression from the Dark Souls I to III, you’ll die less frequently from stun-lock. In LoG, the only time you’ll really find yourself in a place that means almost certain death is if you let two tough enemies get on either side of you.
This is not to say that having segments that require perfection is bad or that rewarding perfection would be bad. Guitar Hero (or my favored knock-off, Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 4) is difficult and complex enough that perfection is a worthy goal, but you aren’t required to be immediately perfect. Beyond that, perfection in the context of music makes sense (and the problems of requiring perfection in music is even the subject of a movie). In other sorts of games, a segment that requires perfection can be a way to increase tension, as long as it isn’t extensive or represent a fundamental change to the game mechanics (like QTEs). Speedrunning a game perfectly can show an incredible mastery, but it shouldn’t be the only way to beat a game.
The trouble only arises when perfection is your only path to progress or when using an unfamiliar set of mechanics. I’ve tried figuring this out with Chezni, and the best thing we came up with was this: perfection is not human. Failure is a part of learning and growth, and requiring perfection eliminates the possibility of learning anything valuable from a mistake. This view ties back in to BTR nicely: when I play perfection games, it makes me feel like I should just write a script to beat the game for me. There is an exact set of inputs that I must enter to progress, and no other set will lead to success – so why should I bother if I have no meaningful input? (Aside: this is also the reason I stopped playing Klondike: it’s only winnable 80% of the time and even a perfect algorithm can’t save you) If I watched a YouTube Let’s Play, I would see the exact same thing as if I had played it. The obvious exception here is that in puzzle games, it’s a challenge that I would have to solve before I could tell a computer to do it – which is the very growth that other such games lack.
Back to BIT.TRIP RUNNER
I couldn’t find any place to put this, but I thought it important to include: the audio cues in BTR take place as the event happens, rather than when you need to hit the button. In other words, the audio for the rhythm game doesn’t actually help you. As you may imagine, this becomes quickly frustrating as the screen fills with sprites and makes it hard to tell precisely when you should jump.
The entire challenge in BTR lies in learning the mechanics and then implementing them. There’s no motivation to do so – you’re learning the mechanics so you can learn more mechanics. You’re implementing the mechanics so you can implement the mechanics. In Tetris you’re seeing how far you can get and trying to beat the top score. In SCGMD4, you want some participation in some good music. In an RPG you want to hear more of the story. But in BTR, the exact same game has been played in the exact same way hundreds of times and all you’re doing is retreading the same path as everyone before you. BTR functions and has a good aesthetic which saves it from Tier Four, but it is firmly in Tier Three for its constant, unyielding requirement of perfection.