Pilgrimage, by Tyler Glail and Michael Swain, has got quite a cheek. Tyler’s faith in art games was sparked by Braid, and yet it’s the one game you can scent the most from this “art game parody”, a playful attack aimed presumably at less successful titles. Interestingly, perhaps unavoidably, it has its own point to make about the games industry.
Humour is crucial to parody, and Pilgrimage offers plenty. The burning eyes of the title, the anger, the butterflies – Swain did a great job with the style, and Tyler’s “artist message” – a wall of impenetrably obtuse text that scrolls slightly faster than you can read it – is probably the funniest thing about the game. Your avatar’s intense, wired appearance (and cape) and the bizarre dominance of the colour pink are also smile-inducing. But what’s it all about?
The protagonist, Jason, has decided to abandon his indie dev community. He feels that it’s being swallowed by false progress, and he must journey to the right of the screen, collecting coins, squishing insectoid waddlers of the “Goomba” archetype, and leaping from platform to platform, in order to set up a new community embodying the values his current community have abandoned.
It’s a nice symbolism – his journey, echoing the baser aspects of Super Mario Brothers, really does return us to those prime dilemmas – can I make it under that gap in time to squish that Goomba, or will he meet me halfway, where I can’t jump high enough to kill him? Should I climb to these higher pathways while I still can, or collect these masses of coins and backtrack if need be? This surmised our entire menu of obstacles back in the day, so it’s an appropriate set of mechanics to raid mercilessly. The link with Braid is obvious as you encounter signs, which throw up pink text dumps of third-person exposition, but I doubt Glail is trying to attack Braid here. This is very much a cheeky homage.
Now, the clever thing: as you make your way towards the end of the level, Swain’s characterful artwork is gently pixellated, the loop of insane merry-go-round music starts to compress and warble, and everything just gets a little… shoddier. By design, I’d stress: this is a clever programming trick that soon makes everything seem just like the good old days, when the various SNES titles achieved the apex of 2d graphics. As it wears on, though, there’s a feeling of falling down a rabbit hole – colours simplify, so now browns and bricks are just red, your dude is like a yellow column with visual noise fluttering at the edges, and the green blobs are probably enemies. I think the yellow things are coins.
It’s interesting, and you can have a little yap about it if you like, but as a game it becomes a different beast. You can look at it like a challenge in abstraction – you’re now a yellow block dodging green blocks to collect flashing yellow blocks. This could have been done better, though – Jason is quickly an unrecognisable mass of random blocks, even when he has four times the pixels Mario had originally. The true value of those games came from making the most of what they had – indeed, the more outspoken members of the indie community have blamed , and Pilgrimage doesn’t make very good use of those pixels at all. It wastes them – they mean nothing. Maybe that’s the point, and if so, point well made – I didn’t actually get any fun from that, though.
No, the end section is remarkable only because it creates a shift in play. The rapid decay of the sounds and visuals, although tied to your position (and therefore under your control), starts to spur you on. You rush through, suddenly careless and mashing keys to reach the terminus of the level. It doesn’t feel… exciting, though. Just frantic. Hard, but not challenging.
It’s a charming-if-substandard platformer with a smirk, essentially – it offers smug criticism of art games, and (whether through neglect or sheer martyrdom) fails to follow its own advice. Give it a play through, but don’t worry about getting all the achievements – this isn’t a game that was meant to be played for fun, as confusing, and underwhelming, as that seems.
