30 Flights of Loving
Comprised of smash-cuts vignettes, pop-noir, and dreamy-lit cube-headed people, 30 Flights of Loving is a short videogame that foregrounds and fractures our emotional cues to filmic tropes. Set in an unspecified country, across but a few minutes, the player gets involved in a guerrilla cell, has shootouts with the authorities, falls in love with another covert agent, tries to save someone, and dies. But as the self-reflexively cartoony game (it has shades of a bootleg futurist ballet fused to Minecraft machinima) ends, the player is ushered in to a virtual art gallery, filled with milling patrons, all of whom are drinking cheap wine and examining various props from the game. In the exhibit there are also interactive explanations of Bernoulli’s principle as applied to aerodynamic lift to puzzle together. With charm and wit, Thirty Flights of Loving repurposes genre tropes and contextual framing to encourage the player explore the way that our minds craft seemingly unified meaning out of the shifting fragments of digital media and computerized spaces.
Creator: Blendo Games (Brendon Chung)
Link: https://blendogames.com/thirtyflightsofloving
Connections:
Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin
Oskar Schlemmer - Triadisches Ballett
Quentin Tarantino - Pulp Fiction
Game Skill Rating: 1.5 (Basic WASD + Mouse control scheme, but mostly exploratory play.)