The Ghosts Of Videogames Yet To Come
Moose Life feels like a game that’s existed as long as videogames. Moose Life feels like a game I’ve never played the likes of before.
Moose Life is really confusing like that. Seriously, it’s kinda baffling.
It’s Llamasoft doing what they do best – a psychedelic arcade game, Vidkidz inspired, honed through 40 odd years of learning on the job, of craft and expertise. Particles fly, words explode, sheep baa. It’s beautiful, hypnotic, it is the zone incarnate.
If Polybius is the videogame as urban legend, Moose Life is the videogame as hauntology, an echo of something familiar that never really was. A day at the seaside never taken, a game never played in a pub, a sports centre, a chip shop. 10 pence pieces never spent, a name in a high score table never entered, a score never beaten.
Moose Life is uncanny in its authenticity yet also unsettling in its impossibility. An anomalous videogame, unstuck in time – too old to be new, too new to be old. Too perfect a combination to have existed before now.
And yet you could swear…
Everything, and I do mean everything, explodes
The amount of explosions in this thing is, quite frankly, obscene.
Thinking back to a lot of the time I spent with Space Giraffe and yeah, it was most definitely out there. That said, despite its reputation it certainly took a while to really let go.
By the time I’d survived through to Level 11 of Moose Life for the first time, my eyesight was absolutely broken.
Not in some metaphorical sense either! For a whole ten minutes afterwards anything and everything I looked at moved. Even words on my phone were zooming towards me.
It took until a good way around the halfway mark for Space Giraffe to have a similar effect on me. It’s completely wild. I loved it!
I can’t imagine sticking your head inside it in VR, blimey. That’s gotta chafe.
Ostensibly, the objective is simple. Shoot enemies, take pills, save the animals, claim a high score. And yet.
Moose Life is a game of Chicken, of forever ducking and weaving inside the map. It is Defender mapped to a 3d space except the player is constantly facing the same way, staring down an endless one way tunnel of bold colours and chunky pixels.
Enemies rez into position, pixels all up the place. Your lasers shatter them back into pixels on contact. Mostly. Sometimes the player ends up changing the state of the enemy, an abstract shape becomes animal, threatening. Cubes shift colours, seem angrier somehow as though the digital distillation of Zelda’s anti-Zeroid cubes.
Everything explodes.
Pills drift into the map offering some of the most ridiculous power ups ever to bless a videogame. Your moose throws a moose party, your moose splits into two – a mirror moose, reflected on the opposite surface.
If a pill drifts past the player, it still exists on the map. Lurch into a panicked reverse, try and remember the baddies that got through your defences so as not to blindly career into them, exploding your moose into pretty colours. Instead, find the pill, explode everything else into pretty colours.
Moose Life is Defender x Ballblazer x Encounter x Devil Daggers x Blaster (with a moose).
There’s so much going on in Moose Life, so many influences, inspirations – work done with intent and coincidentally – that it’s difficult to know where to even start describing it.
The Vidkidz influence is strong, it’s almost Defender mapped to a 3d plane. There’s a hefty dose of David Levine as drifting back and forth within the play area feels a lot like playing the Lucasarts classic Ballblazer (only wilder, obv)
The giant Robotrons flying towards your space moose are more than a passing nod to the criminally underappreciated arcade triumph that was/is Blaster
At times, it has the intensity of Devil Daggers shot through with the DNA of Paul Woakes’ excellent (and all too forgotten alongside Mercenary), Encounter.
It’s the videogame equivalent of a scotch drinker’s dreamiest dream. It’s the special stuff.
It’s early days yet but I rather suspect Moose Life might well be the best Llamasoft game since/alongside Space Giraffe, though as ever that’s all a bit “which best thing is the best?” so maybe ignore me.
Ok, let me try that again.
I’ve adored pretty much everything Llamasoft have punted out on recent gen machines, each and every game having been remarkable in its own standout way. Each game has had a distinct personality, never formulaic unless by necessity (and even then we’re talking Tempest 4000/TxK which are Llamasoft’s formula anyway. Well, and Dave Theurer’s too obviously. Let’s not be rude!), always taking steps to someplace else.
Moose Life feels important in the way Space Giraffe did. Steps forward, yeah? Big arcadey steps forward. It shouldn’t feel as fresh and new as it does but it absolutely does. It absolutely is.
I don’t know where we go from here but I can’t wait to find out. I bet it’s full of stars there too.
Moose Life is available on PC and PS4 in normal-o-vision and VR. I’ve been playing the PS4 version and yes, yes, yes.