Passage; or, Oh Holy God I'm Almost 24

I got this thing where I tend to get overly sentimental when it comes to certain experiences, especially when they're founded in the sweaty pit of gaming. I almost always walk away from these experiences feeling a particular set of feelings in a usually linear order: profound affectation followed by shame and a desperate attempt to forget that I ever got so riled up. I'm sure I could dig up a slew of old hosts and sites that I've cooked up over the last decade or so and see a handful of sentences that would prompt me to cut open my own bowels and spill them across the floor, something like "ICO is the most beautiful achievement ever in the history of mankind, and will push even the most staunch atheist towards a belief in the eternal!"

You know, that kind of shit. Ugh.

But I'm grown up now. I've got a beard, a job, and a college degree. I'm cynical, jaded, and annoying! So when someone recommends me a game by virtue of the fact that it made him cry, I spit out my coffee, leap to my feet and cry "Hogwash! Nothing can pierce this stone heart of mine!", right before I toss some kittens in a pool of sharks and sell off the last operating furnace in an orphanage. But it sure did look interesting, in that hey, I dig me some pixels kind of way, so I played Passage.

Before I dig into the particulars, I'll recommend that you download, install, and play the game. If Passage has any capacity to reach you, it's almost certainly grounded in the exploration of the game itself -- the experience. So play it before someone (namely, me) tells you about it.

Good?

Groovy. So, Passage was created as an entry into the Gamma 256 competition, a development square-off curated by those lovable indie scamps over at Kokoromi. The rules are simple: create a game within a resolution of 256x256 pixels and include Xbox 360 controller functionality. Passage is the first and only game I've played from the list of entries, but if any of 'em are half as good as this one, I'll likely enjoy the lot of them.

Passage is a linear game in the same way that Napoleon was short; it is, in essence, a defining characteristic. I played Passage expecting something to happen if I explored; the landscape, though at first a purely sidescrolling trek, was quickly revealed to be much wider than I expected, dotted with the occasional impassable object and treasure chests. There's no discernible benefit of opening the chests except a wee boost in points and a bit of eye candy when its contents are presented to you like 4th of July fireworks; you touch, open, and move along. As your time spent in Passage lumbers ever onward, your position on the field of play relative to the left and right boundaries of the screen advances pixel by pixel, as does the age of your avatar and his companion. It's profoundly gradual, the sort of thing that you only notice when it manifests in a balding scalp and graying hair, and by the time the realization is upon you, you're already well into the right half of the screen. The background shifts from vista to vista in a brilliantly low-fi transition, blurry and indistinct. When you start out, it's the destination that lies obscured beneath this pixelation effect; as your character grows older, it's where you've been. As you near the right edge of the screen, your companion dies -- instantaneously becoming a tombstone cemented firmly in the earth -- and you continue onward, hobbled by old age, until you yourself succumb to the passage of time. Shit, what a bummer.

By now, I'm sure, you get the message: Passage is about life, time, and choice. Your character's time is limited; meanwhile, your score is increased by either collecting treasure or moving onward with your companion, seeing new things and exploring new places -- so where do you spend your time? What do you do?

Take from the experience what you will, because as one of our community members at Destructoid notes, going overboard on the analysis sort of defeats the purpose behind a game like Passage. But from a critical standpoint, I must confess that I was really stunned when the point finally dawned on me, if only for the ways in which it reflected upon my habits as a gamer -- the sort that explores, investigates, and moves slowly to take in as much as I can -- and how it relates to the grander scheme of things. I was going deep, man. All philosophical and shit. And then I read the creator's statement and realized that every revelation I had while playing Passage was the result of direct authorial intent.

Sure, I felt kinda silly, similar to the aforementioned regret over moments of apeshitery in my youth, the "oh my god Rez is like a transcendent experience jesus christ" nonsense. But in this little 500kb game, creator Jason Rohrer had guided me through one of the most contemplative gaming experiences I've had in years, and one that'll likely stick with me for a long time. That, in itself, is mighty impressive; I'll likely spend the better part of tomorrow digging through the other entrants looking for a similar "whoa what the fuck" sort of rush.

All this just four days before I turn 24, and officially shift from early 20s into that hellish (or so I'm told) pit of mid-20s. That's also one of the reasons I've kicked up Captain Waycool as a blog again -- often times I go a little wild in my own head with thoughts that, while relevant to the sphere of gaming, don't really fit at my usual haunt. I've conscripted blogger to do the heavy lifting for me -- I'm never fucking with MovableType ever again -- so, with any luck, I'll be populating this little debacle right quick. So for the 7th or 8th time, I'm taking a stab at bringing regular updates to Captain Waycool, my idiot little project now almost seven years old. Good lord, I'm getting old.