Format: PC
Developer: Ben Wilhelm
www.mandible.net/2009/09/28/mobius/

In videogames, limbo’s nothing more than the space of time between dying and deciding that you want another go. Purgatory is a cut-scene, or a countdown, or – less frequently these days – a simple cash transaction for another credit. In the glory years of the arcades, all this made solid financial sense. Today, however, a growing number of designers seem less certain about the whole thing.

Games have to include failure, right? Or else they become comparable to those slightly creepy sports days in American kindergartens, where everyone gets a medal just for turning up - that’s the same kind of medal my grandfather got for his participation in WWII, and he was captured within 45 minutes of deployment. He didn’t wear it very often.

But as certain games evolve – this is particularly true of those that evolve towards an emulation of cinema – failure can become a little more awkward to incorporate. In something like Uncharted 2, it’s actually a full-on disaster at times: a mood-killing restaging of a perfectly scripted set piece that’s been designed to be experienced exactly once. In these circumstances, trundling back through a difficult section can be a little like falling out of the boat on the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride and having to catch up by taking a short-cut backstage, where the cogs are exposed, everything moves on rails, and the magic turns out to be nothing more than engineering.

It’s taken a surprisingly long time for failure to become a hot design topic, and only now is there a concerted effect within some teams to work around it. Games like DJ Hero feature no real fail state at all (unless you bought it without realising there’s a Gwen Stefani song on the tracklisting), while Fable 2’s outlawing of restart penalties is still sufficiently controversial to make many players view it with open suspicion.

Inevitably it’s the freewheeling dandies of the Experimental Gameplay Project who are having the most fun with losing. The collective chose ‘failure’ as the theme for its September design challenge, and the results were, ironically, something of a success. The titles produced are typically wide-ranging, from the arch zero tolerance of Zach Gage’s Lose/Lose, which binds winning and really-not-winning together in a way few will wish to emulate (or even experience), as every enemy you shoot down deletes a random file from your own computer, to Raymond Martineau’s Welfare Survivor, a brilliantly grim text adventure that basically speaks for itself. The game that caught my eye, however, is Mobius, a PC title by Ben Wilhelm, which attempts to engage the subject matter on the mechanical rather than merely thematic level.

Mobius is almost a typical RTS: you move units around a battlefield, attacking enemies when you encounter them, and steadily exploring the map. What makes Wilhelm’s game stand out however, other than the delightfully primitive character art, which appears to have been drawn by a barbiturate-addled Vietnam vet forced to draw with his feet after his hands were blown off, is the fact that a central design quirk turns failure on its head, with your units levelling up only when they die in battle.

The real challenge, then, isn’t simply working out the most damage-efficient means of tackling each cluster of foes – although, as ever, that certainly helps. It’s deciding when to cash in a unit so that it comes back to life with a greater attacking power, while taking into account the fact that each death also ensures that the unit in question is reincarnated with less overall health. Ultimately, it’s a balanced mechanic that ensures you can’t simply kamikaze-rush your way to victory.

So Mobius might twist failure into interesting new shapes, but, ultimately, it still requires some kind of terminal punishment to keep things enjoyable. Wilhelm has posted an interesting post-mortem of the game on his blog, in which he’s perhaps a little hard on his work, going on to suggest that all RTSs are inherently flawed because they offer the player such a limited range of actual choices. Whether you agree with that or not, there’s something fascinating, if simple, to be found in his latest game – even if it’s merely the chance to explore the superficial delights of a tricksy mirror-world environment in which death is key to success rather than a predictable symbol of failure.