N++
Developer: Metanet Software
Publisher: Metanet Software
Available on: PlayStation 4
“N++” remains true to the original, favoring minimalist visuals that favor color contrast over object complexity and texture work. Co-engineered with “Dyad’s” Shawn McGrath, it also offers an all-new set of cooperative levels for 2 to 4 players and an overhauled level creator and sharing tool.
As with its predecessors, the game is a flood of variations on the simple concept of running and jumping. You start as a small, black stick figure placed in a two-tone gray tableaux of angular platforms that form a kind of maze of vertical movement. At one end of the room is a switch, which opens an exit door that’s usually on the opposite side.
Across more than 1000 new rooms, this idea is stretched, spun, and split apart in ways that can become torturously difficult. Foregoing the more traditional side-scrolling or vertical scrolling presentation, the game’s insistence on each level fitting into a single screen gives the impression of navigating a series of magical lock tumblers, leaping across abstract ridges and intimidating chasms trying to find a line that perfectly squeezes between the cluster of spiky bombs and the roving security lasers.
The “N” games have been described as “twitchy,” implying a certain reflexive instantaneity, but there’s much more of a sense of slowness and graceful momentum to them. It would be disastrous to try and control the game through split-second reactions. Instead, the game demands patient thought and focused precision in managing the arc of a particular jump, or controlling momentum that can dramatically alter the height or distance of a jump. Jumps need to be planned in advance to make sure the steps leading up to the point of leaving the ground provide the best place to launch. And care is needed to make sure one’s landing velocity and angle won’t send one careering into a bomb.
It’s the kind of game that makes one conscious of the mechanical limits of the controller, hopelessly squeezing the directional pad one way in hopes of reversing momentum or correcting a jump and realizing there isn’t enough precision in the instrument itself. All of the complexity exists in the software’s simulation of gravity, mass, and velocity, factors that feel sometimes insufficiently manipulable through the simple depression of a jump button and directional pad.
Yet, the mechanical limitations of the game’s interface are where the dramatic tension lies, with each level asking players to do something incrementally more complex than the last, nudging players toward a state of total focus on simply pressing and releasing the jump button at the right time. On the surface, one is only jumping from here to there, but after a few hours it’s clear there are a million particular ways to jump, each with its own preparatory rituals.
Though the game doesn’t have a plot or anthropomorphic antagonists, its simplicity carries a narrative sense of self-awareness in its repetitive nature. In “Difference and Repetition,” Gilles Deleuze describes the paradox of repetition with the example of festivals, which attempt to “repeat the ‘unrepeatable.’ They do not add a second and third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ‘nth’ power.” In this light, the title “N” is not just an abbreviation of “ninja,” but an acknowledgment of the algebraic “N,” upon which all operations are performed.
“N++” is a beautiful example of how video games teach players to build relationships with the unseen, turning them into a living connection between the observable world of objects and actions and the invisible simulations of gravity and logic that govern them. Games can create a cult-like fascination when these two realms align for a few moments — the finite frame of the screen and the infinite potentiality lying undiscovered in a game’s code.
“N++” is a testament to that transfixion. It is a meditative and surprisingly intimate game, something that seems to never stop unfolding even as it appears to remain rigorously spare and constant. “N++” is the best in the series and a reminder of why so many have committed themselves to playing in its simple spaces for so long.
Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, The New Inquiry, Kill Screen, Edge, and Gamasutra. Follow him on Twitter @mike_thomsen.