Pretentious Game (PC)
With a name like Pretentious Game, the player is immediately predisposed to expect a cynical satire of self-important video games, and when you play the game’s first chapter, it certainly appears to be one. For those who played artsy flash games in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Pretentious Game evokes memories of such titles relying on simplistic graphics while attempting to be subversive and memorable with shallow twists on expected narrative tropes. A game that lampoons those simple games wouldn’t have to try hard to make fun of them, but after it gets that critique out of its system, Pretentious Game has a surprising amount of effort put into its gameplay that helps it stand out as more than just a bitter jab at a game design trend.
Pretentious Game is split up into five chapters that follow some colored squares as they engage in small platforming levels. Each stage is portrayed as an abstraction of a personal struggle, a bit of narrative text floating in the sky to progress the current square of focus’s personal plot while alluding to the mechanics featured in the current stage. While the game doesn’t name any of the characters, since each chapter focuses on one or two heavily, you begin to recognize the role they play in the almost soap opera level drama that unfolds. The first chapter is the only story that comes right out and acknowledges that its story of love lost is deliberately pretentious, but the four remaining stories seem to almost forget the idea that they’re making fun of this sort of storytelling vehicle. We begin to get stories about infidelity, grief, children growing to be independent, and trying to deal with strong emotions even though acting on them would be fruitless. None of this is done with the expert touch you’d expect from someone truly wishing to discuss these topics and they are mostly the framework to string together levels that manage to twist poetic language describing these struggles into references to potential platforming challenges, but you can begin to get invested in these squares who you can only really identify by their color and the roles they play in the narrative.
Despite the growing quality of the stories and what seems like an effort to either wear the mask of who it is parodying flawlessly or genuinely embrace such storytelling despite the game’s title, Pretentious Game’s main strength isn’t actually the seemingly authentic attempt at an emotional narrative. Instead, despite looking like it’s going to be the most basic of platformers where you need to only move and jump to get to an easily reached destination, Pretentious Game is chock full of creative twists on how you actually engage with its levels. The single line of narration hanging in the air is a clue as to what twist the current level brings, and the game’s ability to make these rather clear, tie into the narrative, and still amuse the player with the actual execution is rather impressive. In a level with the words “I can recover, I know it”, the player has to intentionally take damage to get through the spikes blocking the way to the finish, moving aside to rebuild their health to continue forward. “I move in a fast world” suddenly makes your square move with such incredible speed at even the slightest touch that the platforming suddenly becomes a test of precision and control. A level might zoom in so close you can barely see the world around you, turn the square invisible save for the small effects caused by its jump, ask you to whip out the mouse and literally drag your character to the level’s end, and other nifty changes to what felt like the game’s rules or manage to make otherwise straightforward platforming goals into something entertaining to experience.
Not every concept explored is a winner of course. The fourth chapter in particular has the player assuming control of a brother and sister square that you can swap between, and while this does open up new potential for puzzles, platforming, and quirky gameplay twists, it leans pretty hard on a rather poorly implemented idea. The brother has a jump that is half as high as the sister, and at points in these levels you need to place him on top of her for a boost. Doing so requires an odd jumping dance that can only be pulled off if you carefully move them close together, start jumping, and have the brother quickly jerk to the side during his second jump to land on the sister before her first high jump has fully completed. It is easy to mess up and the fiddling to get it right isn’t enjoyable at all, but thankfully, the game is pretty short even when you factor in all five of its episodes. The brother and sister only occupying episode 4 makes their repeated use of this flawed idea a bit easier to swallow, but there are a few other small levels that aren’t the best. While the game often uses word play to hint at what you’re meant to do, some are a bit obtuse like the square saying he had to behave like a robber in a level with a door and a large black ceiling above, the exact intention of the line feeling like it tried to be clever and failed in a game where the rules are so often in flux.
Fortunately, the game is often successful with its clever little hints, the stage design limited enough that you can keen the intention when the goal is platforming related and the meta challenges serve as a nice way of freshening things up so it’s not just figuring out how you’re meant to jump in the latest level. It achieves a good balance of ones that can be done quickly and ones that require a bit of figuring out, and it certainly ends up the kind of game where you can easily just list all of the cute level solutions that tickled you with their creativeness. The incredibly minimalistic art style and bog standard platform game controls actually do it favors because it makes for an easily adjusted canvas, and similar to games released later like Progress to 100 and What the Golf?, much of the appeal is in seeing what it will cook up for its next level rather than finding anything that demands dexterity or complex problem solving.
Interestingly enough, despite the five chapters presenting a linearly progressing narrative, Pretentious Game allows the player to play whichever chapter they wish. This likely stems from its origins as a flash game that released its chapters over time, meaning each episode is actually still available free to play online provided you can find sites with working versions of all five chapters. Strangely enough, the version of the game I played through Blacknut’s game streaming service only had four of the chapters, but Steam’s release has all five in the game. There’s a mobile release as well, but considering the Steam version is two dollars and you don’t need to hunt down its chapters separately it certainly seems like a good way to play it even though its won’t take long to see all it has to offer.
THE VERDICT: While Pretentious Game prepares you for some cynical critique of lazy flash games that cover their shortcomings with cheap artsy twists, it quickly dispenses with any attempt to lambast such titles and instead becomes a pretty good example of how to do one well. The emotional melodrama the colored squares go through is a vehicle for fun mechanical twists on a platform game template, fascinating little concepts spicing up stages as you try to suss out the relationship between the wordplay in the poetic narration and the simple imagery on screen. Some parts like the brother and sister chapter are weakened by leaning on weak ideas, but most of this game’s short duration is a tour of interesting gameplay twists that are just clever enough to keep you along for the ride.
And so, I give Pretentious Game for PC…
A GOOD rating. Were it a simple parody of the kinds of low effort flash games that coasted by on cheap attempts at narrative depth, Pretentious Game would be the quickly dismissed but mildly amusing satire it seems like it will be in its first chapter. Games like Thomas Was Alone, which thankfully the developer said it wasn’t parodying with this game’s oddly similar design, show that well written narration can draw out emotion from even simple shapes, but Pretentious Game’s melodramatic soap opera story doesn’t seem to be angling for that approach even if it can sometimes hit an emotional beat with surprising strength. Instead, Pretentious Game uses the framework of describing an emotional drama to lay out clues for how the newest level will play out, and the game’s willingness to keep exploring how it can break out of the mold of a simple platformer makes the adventure entertaining enough that it actually joins Thomas Was Alone in showing up games that didn’t attempt much beyond a shallow twist to try and excuse away their limited designs.
Pretentious Game’s name is actually good at disarming the player, essentially dismissing attempts by the player to read more into it while still also providing a fairly enjoyable gameplay experience with a sufficient narrative backbone that directly impacts the action in many literal ways. Were it trying to ease you in naturally it might have come off as sappy or full of itself, but it comes right out of the gate and tells you that shouldn’t read too deep into the game even as it starts constructing what seems like a genuine attempt to write something that balances gameplay and story despite the self-imposed limitations. It’s a game that both knows when to break the boundaries of its design but never goes so far that its core is shaken beyond recognizability, and while it has its share of basic stages or ones with weaker ideas for how the specific level twist should be executed, the amount of thought put into Pretentious Game beyond its scathing title shows in how amusing many of its stage concepts turn out to be.