As an awkward ten-year-old with a lot of free time, I loved nothing more than my brand-new copy of Super Mario 3. The endless parade of new worlds to explore and strange secrets to unlock captured my imagination in a way that did not let me go, even when I was away from the TV. Stuck in the classroom, I couldn’t continue the adventure, so I started drawing my own. I filled every notebook margin with diagrams for new Mario levels, sketching in enemies and secrets and traps and at some point probably laser guns and a Mega Man crossover. My imagination was working at full steam, so nothing was off-limits.
But at some point I began to think about the levels more literally, as if I was actually Bowser, laying out my fortress to make it impossible for any Italian plumbers to make it through alive. Why not just put up a wall that Mario can’t pass? Well, you can’t do that; the player has to be able to win the game. You can’t just have a mile-long lava pit. But you could dot it with tiny platforms to form a tricky, barely-passable bridge. And add a spiked ceiling. With enemies that fly around and dive-bomb you. At what point does the level become not just challenging, but frustrating? When does play turn into punishment?
My creations might have fit in alongside some tough-as-nails NES platformers released around then, but as time went on, that kind of gaming experience melted away. Games got prettier and more expensive to make, thus having to become more accessible and just downright easier. Years after the first Zelda game had players scouring worlds with barely a clue to go on, Link suddenly found himself getting literally yelled at by a helper fairy until he followed her advice. Mario, who used to hunt for invisible passages and extra lives squirreled away in the basements of pyramids, would now reach the third level of his new game only to be told by a grinning bunny that he should press the A button to jump.
It can be hard to find a truly challenging video game these days. I don’t mean hard; any game can have a hard mode. I mean a game that constantly expects the best out of you, from your brain as much as your reflexes. But one recent game does this in the form of an obsessive love letter to those early years of gaming. Like the scribbles from a 1988 school notebook brought to monstrous, glorious life, this game constantly blurs the lines between imagination, challenge, and punishment. This game is called La Mulana.
La Mulana is an indie game released in 2005 that looks like it could have come out before Mario 3. I suspect the designer(s) had a childhood a lot like mine, only with more of a fetish for Metroid and Maze of Galious, sketching out increasingly complex tapestries of longform adventuring, adding in vital details over the years as they played probably Contra and definitely Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, refining and synthesizing and laser-focusing an 8-bit experience into a diamond-hard lattice structure bigger and smarter than any game of that era could hope to achieve. It’s a glorious experience for anyone wishing to revisit the nostalgia of the era without retreading the exact same ground. And if 8-bit is too far back for you, there’s even a 16-bit remake from 2012 (which is the one I played. From what I understand, the gameplay aspects are mostly the same).
Surely I won’t need to tell you which is which
You play an archaeologist investigating a network of underground ruins, both to search for your missing father, and to learn more about a mysterious legendary figure named “Mother” whose role in the story is several-fold. (A Freudian analysis of this story could fill a ten-thousand-word essay on its own; suffice to say that the game’s mythology is deep, fascinating, and extremely creepy.) That’s the stated goal, but your realistic goal is basically: solve all the puzzles, find all the items, kill all the monsters. Video games 101. Who needs the instruction book? Just turn on the game, run to the right and start whipping!
And there it is: you’ve already made your first mistake.
La Mulana will not hold your hand, and you will frequently ignore its subtle advice at your peril. (Which is as good a time as any to say: SPOILERS from here on out, be warned.) You may easily miss the advice that you’ll need two special items to make any progress at all. First is a hand scanner, which you will use to decode ruins, search for clues amongst corpses, and at later points in the game, actually unlock secrets. Second is a series of, essentially, paperweights: things that look like little logs that you will put on pedestals to open doors and solve puzzles, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style. Now that you’ve realized you need these things, you leave the ruins, head back into town, talk to some NPCs, purchase the scanner software and a bunch of weights and head back down into the ruins again. A few screens in, you’ll come across your first honest-to-god pedestal; you’ll go up to it and pleasurably hit the down arrow to drop a weight, expecting to solve your first puzzle.
And there it is: you’ve already made your second mistake.
The pedestal disappears upon activation, and the ceiling collapses and crushes you. Game over; you get to start again.
YOU FUCKED UP, SON
La Mulana trades in frequent, unexpected punishment. Sometimes it’s done hilariously, like in the case above. Sometimes it’s done frustratingly, like at the end of certain boss battles where only one very specific action will prevent automatic death. But it is usually at least logical. You could have known not to press that booby-trapped pedestal, if you had just walked a little farther beyond it first, and gotten a clue from scanning a nearby corpse. This is game that rewards thoughtful action as much as it rewards reflexes. And that’s even more impressive considering how streamlined your character’s abilities are: you’ll solve most puzzles by using either those pedestals, your scanner or your whip. Even the most helpful “bonus” you get in the game – the Holy Grail, which allows you to warp from almost any location to a save point – elegantly becomes a strategic play mechanic in itself, necessary to whisk you out of deep pits or crushing traps when no other escape exists.
One pretty genius trap is an unblinking eye, usually sitting in a wall somewhere, impossible to hurt and often easy to overlook until it’s too late. They are sentries of the ruins, and will zap you with lightning if you strike anything in the room that’s considered “sacred”. The lightning hurts you more than just about anything else in the game, regardless of your character’s level, armor or HP. But it will only hurt you if you do the wrong thing. This is a neat trick: these traps might as well be the game designers themselves watching and operant-conditioning you to take the puzzles seriously instead of just running around whipping everything you see. Of course, the “sacred items” change from room to room, and some of the most harrowing puzzles in the game come from trying to figure out what to hit and what to avoid.
La Mulana has a virtuoso, terrifying knowledge of the friction and flow of a screen. You will figure out the quickest way from point A to point B, only to discover that the monsters know that path too and have already thrown fireballs, arrows, bones, spears, swords, lightning, magic hexes and bits of themselves right into that path at just the right second to mess up your speed run. (Particularly brutal rooms have also predicted your paths of avoidance and have put spike traps there, too.) Every room is packed with resistance, even if some forms of it don’t present themselves right away.
(Side note: my roommate tells me that watching someone play La Mulana is hilarious. I assume it’s like watching Duck Amuck, because I often felt about as powerless as Daffy Duck struggling against the whims of a sarcastic (but more bloodthirsty) animator.)
Hope you like this screen, because you’ll be seeing it a lot.
There’s a really brilliant puzzle a little less than halfway through the game. Three blocks sit in a room, along with a target plate. You know, through lots of experience by this point, that you must push one of the blocks onto the target plate in order to solve the puzzle. But the plate is just out of reach of any of the blocks. Try as you might, you cannot get any of the blocks up to it. You wonder if you need an item you don’t yet have. You wonder if you need to use an item you already have in a totally different way. Nothing works. Finally, in frustration or happenstance, you stand on the plate yourself for a second. Your weight causes the plate to break and it disappears. You realize the plate was never the key to this puzzle in the first place. And as soon as you realize that, and look around for what else you can do with the blocks in this room, the true puzzle answer becomes as obvious as a carp on toast. The puzzle works because it’s such a specific inversion of the strategies you’ve learned up to this point, and it teaches you to keep your brain limber and take nothing for granted. When you solve it, you feel like the smartest guy in town.
There’s a really frustrating puzzle a little more than halfway through the game. The area itself is more than a little annoying, with a lot of warping between areas where backtracking does not always take you where you expect; but the warping has consistent rules and you will figure out how to navigate the areas pretty quickly. You’ll come to a room which seems to lead no further. You scan everything, jump everywhere, hit whatever you can. Go ask your fairy friend for help. Get nothing. And finally, with no other options, you swallow your pride, jump online and look up the game’s walkthrough. (Actually, you probably have the walkthrough bookmarked by this point. More on that later.) Turns out you need to stand at a certain spot and press the down arrow. You warp through the floor into an area and continue on. It’s not even a hidden ladder, or an area specially marked with anything that would indicate action needs to be taken there. None of the many clue tablets sprinkled throughout the ruins mention this (that I can remember). And pressing down as a warp method is never used as a vital play mechanic for the rest of the game. The puzzle doesn’t work because its solution has no clue or precedent. When you solve it, you feel like you’ve finally guessed the random number your annoying friend was thinking of. (Turns out it was 4,178.)
This game has been translated from its Japanese original, so it’s possible that some of the difficulty comes from poorly translated clues, though I doubt it. The English text throughout is generally well-phrased and often morbidly hilarious; if a clue sounds particularly obtuse, it does so in a way that feels accurate to the syntax of a centuries-old stone tablet instead of a cheap Babelfish translation. Actually, the clues do a great job of suggesting solutions without spelling them out; there’s an especially fantastic one that reads “sleep inside the woman”, with a rough diagram of the room it pertains to. The clue is absolutely vital to figuring out a solution that ends up being hilarious, obscure and brilliant all at the same time. Elsewhere, broken runes will frustrate you with incomplete clues, while feeling completely appropriate in their thousand-year-old setting.
(Another side note: the music is fantastic and addictive, perfectly splitting the difference between the energy and momentum of the best Mega Man themes and the atmosphere and foreboding of old Castlevania scores. And there’s even a tune that samples Punjabi MC.)
If you have anything resembling a regular job, family or social commitments, or anything less than a saintly level of patience, you will not finish La Mulana without help. On several occasions. At first, it bothered me having to consult a walkthrough. Shouldn’t the alert player be able to figure out everything on their own, without solutions feeling too arbitrary? Sure, although some of the truly classic video game secrets – the Konami Code, the Super Mario Bros minus world, hell, even the first warp zone – gave no indication of their presence until a friend told you how to do it. Although these are bonuses, and intrinsically different from a puzzle solution necessary just to reach the game’s next screen. I think there’s a significant difference. But I also think it’s less of a deal today than it used to be. You need the internet to get La Mulana in the first place, so is it really so weird that you need it to help finish the thing? And your ego can rest easy in that no amount of secret-spoiling will help you through the boss battles, which are legitimate trials of dexterity and patience without any magic bullets in sight.
This fucking guy. You don’t even know.
This is a game for players who want a real challenge. But La Mulana is not a game that can be outsmarted. If there is any gamer out there who can finish it without getting one single piece of help, they are probably of the kind of neurotic, hygienically-unsound variety who will drink nothing but Diet Coke for five years to win a dollar bet. You don’t want to be that person or know anything about them. It’s frustrating that many puzzle solutions seem arbitrary – particularly in the final hours, where the progression of Mantra locations deteriorates from logical to nonsensical, and the solution of the very final, post-end-boss challenge seems like one last kick to the teeth. The punishment can at times outweigh the challenge. But at least the developers seem to realize the nature of the monster they’ve created, and give zero fucks about it: in their own summary of the game, they suggest you “Play through the entire game till your fingers bleed, give up and throw it out the window, or get help from strategy guides. The choice is yours.”
In other words, La Mulana is a platforming passion project that you have to accept on its own terms. Your ration of fun-to-frustration may vary; mine was something like 65-35. But I never felt bored or belittled; instead, I was constantly mulling over clues I’d discovered, thinking up ways to stop getting my ass kicked by that miniboss, and more than anything, looking forward to discovering that next screen. That sense of exploration, the ecstasy of getting just a little bit further and seeing just a little bit more, pervades every corner of the game so completely that, in its massive shadow, all else is forgiven. It’s immersive and inspiring in such a nostalgic way that if my workstation had margins, you can be sure I’d be filling them with new La Mulana levels, secrets and traps, my imagination gloriously full-steam, nothing off-limits.
—
La Mulana is available for free in its original 8-bit PC version; for the 16-bit remake, several different versions exist including PC ($15) and WiiWare ($10). I’d recommend the Steam version, which the developers note is the most recent and “complete” port of the game, including a bonus level and features not in the WiiWare port.
The Daily Friction 