Narcissus is a beautiful, fast-paced addictive little game – but it is a bit of a bastard.
Not in a bad way. Its a bastard in the loving sense, one that coaxes you through its frustrating platforming and encourages you to improve, no matter how close the two little runners onscreen were to completing the level before one of them missed a jump and fell helplessly into a space pit.
At least the game’s idea is a novel one. We’ve had more than enough endless running games that follow just one tomb raider type as he/she bounds through the undergrowth, but in Narcissus, you control two pixelated fellows as they traverse a number of floating space islands. At the start of every level gravity is inverted for each character, and so they run across the top and bottom of each island respectively.
The game gives you a few easy tutorials so you can get the hang of tapping either side of the screen to cause each respective character to jump. But then the platforms start to vary in size and become less symmetrical, creating different routes for each character to follow. With twice the amount of pixelated parkour to keep track off, a single lapse in concentration can lead to a remarkable speedy game over, which whisks you back to the start of the (thankfully brief) level.
The game waits until you’ve passed about three areas before its inner bastard really shines through. When your little sprinters jump off certain islands, their gravity is inverted so that they flip over and begin jumping off from the other direction. The game’s fast-paced nature means that its often not possible to keep track which way they are facing fast enough, and most of the time it feels like you are relying on luck to get through unscathed.
Then again, when you do beat a particularly stressful level, there’s always a chance the background for the next will swap to a lovely soothing turquoise. Narcissus has eye-popping pixelated visuals after all, and its protagonists leave a charming trail of cyber-bubbles behind them as they run. If only the little guys were a bit bigger, perhaps I wouldn’t have to squint to look and see if I had actually made the jump or if I am, in the nicest possible way, falling to my buggering death for the umpteenth time.
The controls also felt like they weren’t completely precise – often I swore I’d tapped before reaching the end of the platform, only to see one of ma pixel boys continue to run, fall and slide down the wall of the next island like an ACME cartoon. But this could be because the game is so relentlessly speedy, its characters are so tiny, and my own mind is so exhausted from pretending to be an adult all day that I couldn’t react fast enough.
For the more switched-on endless runner fan, Narcissus presents a decent challenge. If you love Canabalt so much that you wish you could play two runs of it at the same time, you’re in luck, as someone’s made this much more colourful version.
But yeah, just to warn you: It is a bit of a bastard.
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