Time and Punishment: Drawing Challenge out of the Past in LA MULANA

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.

A Helpful Visit

The comic is actually way bigger, so please click here to read it in the hi-res glory that this ramshackle black-and-white comic was meant for!

 

She may not want this, but I’m giving credit to my friend Meredith for the germ of this idea a few months back. I think I had been acting like a smart ass at the time (imagine that).

The Frictive Story of Our Lives

“OK,” you may be thinking after you finished reading my explanation the other day.

“I get what you’re saying,” you may think further, “Life is often made worse by the little things – or by several little things snowballing into a Pretty Big Thing. Most people are at least vaguely aware of this phenomenon. But if you need to keep yourself constantly aware of the detritus that accumulates around the edges of your focus – which, I mean, by the way, seems unnecessary because this friction inherently makes itself known to you anyway – why not just leave yourself a note or a warning on your bedside table, or in the car or wherever? Why name your precious Blog after it?”

“Why celebrate the shit in life?”

I have two responses to this. First: wow, you’re as long-winded as I am.

Second: well, at first I thought the title wasn’t celebrating so much as acknowledging. Like, “I know the true name of the devil and so he has no power over me” and all that. But that’s not entirely true, is it? To name something is to give it an identity, and to acknowledge an identity is to give it some small amount of power over you.

I guess I really am celebrating the Daily Friction in our lives, but only as we might retroactively celebrate the fever that kept us home on the day of the o-chem pop quiz. I’m not about to buy friction a fucking cake or anything. What should be celebrated is not the friction itself, but the opportunity that it gives us to evaluate our surroundings.

Imagine a world where everyone and everything is permanently coated in a Super-Lard that removes any and all friction from physical activity. Smell aside, this world would seem pretty cool to inhabit at first: you could basically rollerskate everywhere on your feet, condoms would be way cheaper, and the word “chafe” would cease to exist. But remember a moment ago, I said cool “at first.” Once the shock of no-more-shocks wore off, we’d get painfully used to a world without pain pretty quickly. We’d feel little – if anything – from a swim in the pool, running barefoot through grass, or eating a crunchy oatmeal cookie. Even sex would get boring. We’d become physically numb.

Here in the real world, though, we can use these little bits of friction to appreciate texture, determine value differences, cause or receive surprise; the list goes on and on. Friction creates feeling.  Nothing makes us feel alive more than a sensation that shakes us out of complacency, whether it’s love or pain, pride or betrayal.

Humans understand this on a subconscious level, too. Friction has become a societal norm of ours to the point where some people will actually manufacture it to either fit in with others or entertain themselves. Think of the people you know who have never really had a tough life, and what “struggles” they actually deal with every day. The successful VP who hasn’t been promoted in months. The gorgeous actress who just can’t seem to make the career jump from supporting role to leading lady. The trust fund hipster who’s incensed that his cappuccino doesn’t have enough foam. Ask any of them how their lives are going, and they will explain these horrors to you in immaculate detail. You are allowed to leave at any point during the ensuing conversation.

Friction keeps us grounded. Without it, well, I can’t say that we would all become intolerable assholes – because “asshole” is a subjective term based on social norms, and if everyone walked around complaining about losing a sequin off of their Ed Hardy jackets, that would only result in a worldwide commiseration followed by a return to the store for newer, shinier jackets for all – BUT, without friction, our human need to infuse our lives with Drama and Importance would turn molehills into entire Appalachian Ranges of loathing, mid-life heart attacks and global wars based on faulty evidence.

Oh, wait.

Anyway, I guess my point is that The Daily Friction needs to be not just acknowledged, but understood. We need to appreciate that there are benefits as well as downsides. It’s an ongoing process/goal/dilemma that will not always be easy for everyone, and especially not for me. But I think that doing so is vital to life and to health. Because, at the end of the day, Friction is not going anywhere and we might as well get used to it, or else.

I mean…I almost want to say that we should be like a smiling Sisyphus, happy in our daily uphill boulder-rolling because it gives us a goal, builds our muscles and keeps us out of a stuffy office environment. Is that fair? Or too much of a pinko commie thing to say? If we can change our definition of what makes us happy, shouldn’t we? Isn’t happiness the simple goal that all of us are forever trying to achieve, and ultimately more important than any political or social dictates?

I don’t know. Maybe that’s a discussion for another time.

And some kinds of love are mistaken for vision

What’s more important in our artists: success or happiness?

I mean, yes, obviously, it is possible to be both successful and happy. (And here I’m defining “success” from an artistic/critical standpoint, not commercial, which brings about its own set of issues.) A lot of great music, literature and visual art has come from artists in positive mindsets. So this shouldn’t even be a choice worth discussing.

Right?

Maybe. Look, it’s not an entirely uncommon idea that artists often produce their best work when they’re miserable, depressed, paranoid, jealous, etc, place your favorite descriptor of an unhappy life here. Let’s pretend for a second that this has a kernel of truth – those with an axe to grind probably have something more interesting to say than those who are just hanging out, right? If so, it can create a problem for an artist’s followers and fans. Do you wish your favorite artist the best in life, or do you want the quality of their work to remain as high as possible, no matter the cost?

Quick example: One of my favorite bands is The National. Lord knows I can’t recommend these guys enough. They write some of the most beautifully depressing music I’ve ever heard. And they’re perfectly allowed to write happier songs, too – a lot of their newer, comparatively more positive stuff is good, but I always feel like they’re better at illustrating a whiskey-soaked, heartbroken 3am comedown than describing the best way to make their girlfriend laugh. (Maybe it’s me.)

Some friends and I went to see their show several weeks ago, and we were blown away by their performance and musicianship as usual. But we also noticed singer Matt Berninger seemed to be having a tougher time of it than usual. Struggling with some of his more personal lyrics. Nervous, abortive physical maneuvers around the stage. Lots of screaming. It was the kind of intensely awesome performance we hadn’t seen out of him since maybe ’06. And we (arbitrarily) decided that he must have broken up with his girlfriend. Which in turn made us think “cool, now he’s going to start writing darker music again.”

Which is a pretty fucked up thing to think, leap of logic or not. As an artist, your fans are bound to gravitate toward certain works, and what they might expect from you is not necessarily what you want to provide (our frequent concert shout-outs requesting one of the most depressing songs ever written always go unheeded, sadly). It’s a divide that comes with the territory. But it’s another thing entirely for fans to desire a quality of life for the artist.

Ideally, yes, we would like our artists to be happy/comfortable/rich and also to continue producing excellent works of art. But if you have to choose one result over the other, what would it be? Is it even a choice where, after having made it, we could still feel comfortable with ourselves? It’s a burden I wouldn’t want to have to bear, though it’s a choice I feel I sometimes unconsciously make about artists I genuinely respect.

And, if someday my writing finds a fanbase and some level of popularity, it’s also something that many strangers may be quietly theorizing about me. Which is pretty fucking creepy.

Dead Rock and Roll, Remodeled

What makes a bad story? Or – if it’s a different question – what makes a story bad?

I’ll admit I enjoy a bad story every now and then, whether it’s a book or movie or TV show or whatever. I think a lot of us enjoy a kind of creative schadenfreude, and there’s a certain unique enjoyment you can only get by gathering around with your friends to experience something just indescribably, laughably bad.

But, okay, as a writer, I can also try to justify this viewing/reading/listening as a tutorial of What Not To Do. I could learn a lot about filmmaking and storytelling by watching any of this year’s Best Picture nominees; but, in theory, I could learn just as much watching something like Zoltan: Hound of Dracula.

Yesterday, as we sat down to re-watch the infamous MST3K classic “Manos” the Hands of Fate, a no-budget ’60s “cult horror film” generally recognized as one of the worst (and most unintentionally hilarious) movies ever made, I began to have new and unsettling thoughts. “This movie is awful,” I thought to myself, “but did it have to be?” And, following the only genuinely creepy few seconds of the film – a quick gloss over a decrepit mantle, with what looks like the ashen silhouette of a dead man burnt into its relief – I began to have an even more unsettling thought: “could I remake this into a good film?”

There’s no doubt that this film is pretty terrible on every level, from the wooden acting to the incompetent shot framing to the almost-nonexistent plot. But there is a plot, as bare-bones as it is; and that plot came from a rough outline, which in turn came from a germ of an idea which surely must have looked far better in writer/director/star Hal Warren’s mind than what Manos eventually became. Could that idea have actually borne fruit? What’s the difference between a shitty story and a story made shitty?

If I had to summarize the plot of Manos, keeping my opinions out, it would go something like: “A vacationing family spends the night in a desert shack, not knowing they’re the prey of a nearby satanic cult”. OK. So far, so not bad. A logline like this could pretty easily form the basis of a decent film, and, if the stars align, maybe even a great one. It’s not impossible to imagine.

But let’s add in some more details. Let’s clarify that the cult is essentially one man and his harem of wives, all of whom only come out at night; let’s also say that the family is initially cared for – and then betrayed by – a deformed and creepy caretaker named Torgo. And (spoilers!) we admit that the cult will successfully imprison the family, with the wife and daughter (who can’t be older than five!) added to the harem, and the husband/protagonist taking up the caretaker position after Torgo apparently dies. Also, the main cultist sleeps outside on a slab of rock while his wives sleep tied to poles (though they seem able to free themselves at any time). The wives also love to wrestle each other for hours at a time. And don’t forget the guy wears a black robe-thing with gigantic fucking red hands on it!

See? It’s tricky to spot the point of no return.

But there’s examples in other media too. Take the relatively-unknown novel The Lost Truth by Mike Pesko. Pesko wrote most of the “military thriller” (?) as a teenager, and was lucky enough to have it printed by a small publisher. Check out some of these highlights:

“”Come on, men,” Fletcher shouted to his hundred soldiers as he ordered ten of them into the air. He directed half of them to take out the two big gunners and the other three to hold the easily vulnerable transport ships in captivity and demand an unconditional surrender.”

“”Get your ass out of bed,” the commander barked with a different timbre than used the last time they talked.”

“There was more than one way to capture or kill a foreign military general. If casualties on their side were large compared to your casualties, then you have killed the foreign general. If you took out his capital building, then you have captured him. There were also other miscellaneous ways.”

Although we’ve wanted to turn this into a movie – so faithful to the book that every time we see a map of Dushku (yes, Dushku) it changes from an island to a series of islands to an archipelago to whatever else – I also confess to imagining the possibilities of, you guessed it, remaking the book to see if it could really work. At its base, The Lost Truth is about a man struggling to unite diverse groups of people against an enemy force almost completely indistinguishable from their own.

God, put that way it sounds a lot like Battlestar Galactica, doesn’t it? Even moreso when we add the detail that it takes place on a distant planet populated with humans much like us. But let’s keep going. Let’s add the detail of the enemy forces: the deadly, galaxy-traveling Are (yes, Are) race, who are able to possess humans because they’re one-dimensional beings (this couldn’t possibly have been an intentional joke), though they never have a larger goal besides victory through warfare. Also, a series of ill-defined neighbor countries who are always at war for generally left-wing reasons such as personal freedoms or democratic voting recounts. And, hey, a lot of sea life died due to an orbit change because the sun doesn’t have enough gravity for Dushku anymore. Again, that slippery slope is tough to navigate.

But here’s the thing. Despite how Manos and The Lost Truth turned out, there’s no reason to think Hal Warren or Mike Pesko couldn’t go on to produce competent pieces of work. The creativity is obviously there, even if craftsmanship is lacking. These guys obviously had stories they wanted to tell, and I couldn’t fault anyone for that. But what would it have taken to make these works competent? Would they even be recognizable in comparison to what we have now? I wonder if The Lost Truth could have been saved by an editor or writing classes. I wonder if Manos would have prospered with a larger budget (and all the improvements that entails). Would we all be better off? Or are these works actually more important to us as failures, as warnings to future travelers along the road of creativity?

Truth be told, I don’t have answers for any of this, aside from “Everything is the way it is” and “Speculation will buy you the greatest mansion you’ll never see”. I can’t think of a single infamously bad work that someone has tried to recreate as an actual good story. It might be a fun experiment for those with the time and inclination, or an unexpected cash cow for a Hollywood that’s obsessed with remodeling over new-modeling.

Yeah. now we’re talking.