The game does these kinds of things to you often, playing with your mind. Only it doesn't always say them as explicitly as that waterfall does. If you were to jump in right at the beginning of the game, you'd eat a hard burgering against the rocky ground. There's too much and you'd get pulled away in the physics of your bouncing and die before you could ever check anything out. But if you come back later when you're strong enough, you survive, and get nothing for it except the feeling that you accomplished something, you made that jump they told you not to. In a way it serves as a pretty good allegory for the game right there at the start—don't be afraid to walk away and come back later. Devilishly though, it also makes you believe it's okay to walk away on a puzzle before you've really done everything you can do. It's a theme they establish early on that runs throughout the game. Is it okay to walk away or isn't it? Are you really supposed to be here? No, you're not—unless you are.
I only started playing La-Mulana (an "old-style" 2D platforming/adventure game now available via the Wii Shop Channel for ten dollars) a couple days ago, but since then I've been trying to figure out why exactly I think it's such a great game. It's been kind of hard to nail it down, which is proving rather troubling as I sit down to write this. And it's not for lack of trying! I've known almost since the very beginning that I had to say something about it today on here, and I just figured it would all come into place! And here we are, I've false-started a thousand words already. Maybe it's appropriate that a game which has basically subjected me to a completely foreign set of mechanics also confounds the very process that I comfortably go through for this website three times a week.
The mechanics, yeah, at first I was sure that was it. La-Mulana is special to me because it is the first game in a really long time where I've played it and found that the skills that I've assembled from a lifetime of gaming have—to a not-insignificant degree—been rendered pretty much useless. There are elements of everything mixed in, sure, but the combination is disorienting. At first, you don't unlock doors using keys, you do it by putting little rocks called "weights" on tiny nearby pedestals. And did I say unlock? Well it's more sliding walls out of the way. Oh, walls, not doors. Or sometimes pillars. Or sometimes you think it will open the door but then you are immediately stabbed/crushed to death by a trap instead. And you don't find the weights in dungeons, you buy them from little huts using money that you almost never come across and which doesn't reliably respawn if you leave and come back. And did I say dungeons? I mean "the entire, gigantic, interconnected structure which is the game world."
But everything is like this. You gain abilities by loading programs onto your laptop computer. Ammunition for your subweapons is essentially non-existent. You start with a single whip and virtually nothing else and it has a pathetic range. And the next weapon you get has an even shorter range. Jumping works like the original Castlevania, with that kind of untweakable momentum, but the levels are huge and multi-tiered like Metroid and a single bad hit can send you uncontrollably flying three floors away. Sometimes you'll put your wall-stabbing skills to the test looking for secret passages, and then you hit something you weren't supposed to hit and you will be electrocuted to death by a bolt of lightning for some reason you don't understand yet. There are treasure chests but if you walk in front of them you can't open them, you have to do some other little puzzle first to crack them open then you have to hit them with your weapon to get the stuff inside. The rules are different than the ones we're all used to. That's why I was sure they were what was making me love the game.
Later I started thinking about it more. What separates the rules and mechanics from the game itself? Maybe it isn't those things that I like, but actually just "the game." Like in Zelda you get the compass, you get the map, you get the keys to solve a puzzle to get the treasure, you use the treasure to get the big key and then you use the big key to fight that boss and get your heart container and then you leave the dungeon and put that new treasure to the test in the world to find the next dungeon. Is that the game or are those the rules? In La-Mulana, in a single area, you have to get the boss jar to appear in the boss room, then get the consumable jewel that allows you to open a boss jar, then kill the boss. But killing a boss doesn't often provide a way forward, and you almost always have to have done things in other places to achieve most of what you end up doing in an area. Everything's outta whack! And when I first started playing, I didn't know that you had to make the boss jar appear, and once it did I didn't know how to open it. In a way, those are rules, but I think what they actually are are the game.
It made it easier for me to think about it in the same way that I think about writing when I do it here each time. Sure, at the top, I have the main idea. "Explore a world full of puzzles until you have gotten to the end." On the way though, usually, there is a paragraph with one idea and a paragraph with another idea and we go on through until we have reached the end, the world has been explored. Maybe kind of like a spider on the wall, a flat surface with a few legs touching it and all the legs feed into that little body, the point itself.
La-Mulana is more like the spider has a lot more legs, and each leg has some legs connected to it, and maybe sometimes those legs connect to other legs, and oh there are a few spiders on different walls, and all the spider bodies have some wires that wire them up to another gigantic spider, and you are so tiny and have these little small eyes and you can't see which legs connect to where and what the hell am I saying? You never know what little tendril serves another piece. Finishing something somewhere might open something up on the opposite side of the world, and you don't even know it until you end up back there again. But there are signs, there are clues. This isn't like the first Zelda, where you're just guessing. There is a hint for everything. But the hints are usually never anywhere near where you need them, and they're all wild and cryptic. Still, they are there.
Yet I still wasn't sure that's why I really like the game! These things are just "what the game is," how it exists. There has to be more than that. So I thought maybe what I like about it isn't its parts but just how it makes me feel. It's like everything is just different enough to make me believe that I can't trust anything that I know. When I play La-Mulana I shut down, but I become conscious, I become afraid. It's partly because the rules are keeping me off-balance, it's sort of because the game doesn't let me know exactly how close or how far I am from doing anything correctly. In a way it's because the hints tell me things that when I can use I feel like a genius for discovering and when I can't use assume are just nonsense. But none of it is nonsense, not so far at least—at some point I always realize I've been putting the pieces together, taking it all for what it is as a whole instead of its parts.
Probably that's really what it is after all. In doing enough things differently, the game has tricked me into trying to understand which part of it I really need to focus on. It has new rules so I figured I should try to understand them. It has new kinds of game progression so I thought maybe I should pay attention to them. It simultaneously discourages exploration via a variety of difficult traps and minibosses while requiring it in order to progress.
When all of it comes together, that's what I really love, that feeling that just like the archaeologist in the game, I've snuck into somewhere that nobody is supposed to be. That little guy in the game is me, for real! And despite everything that I've never seen in my gaming travels before—the crazy ancient traps, the strange weapons lying around, the way the adventure progresses, the enemies and the ruins that others like me have tried—and failed—to surmount, their tiny skeletons littering the ground as evidence—I'm making my way through, getting a little further each time, one step closer to something else that I am sure will surprise me completely. La-Mulana is a game that tells me each step of the way that this place is a place that maybe I shouldn't be yet. Unless I should.