Diversions of the field.
Logfolk Graveyard is where it happened.
There should be a plaque really.
In a game where time can become a bright fizzing blur, I somehow remember the exact moment.
But then Logfolk Graveyard came along with the optional challenge:Advance trick through a Ghost.
The basics have remained unchanged for obvious reasons.
You hold and then release the stick for trick: choose a direction and see what happens.
Can you land it?
Can you link it together with other tricks?
Can you incorporate a grab?
But advanced tricks build on that with a bit ofStreet Fighter 2.
Hold the stick and then do a quarter turn - or more than a quarter turn.
Harder to do in a rush, and you’re always in a rush here.
Harder - for me at least - to internalise.
Yet it’s all expanded!
The first two OlliOllis were truly 2D affairs, scrapbook flat.
Models and assets are 3D, but the world bucks away from the 2D plane a bit as well.
There will be half-pipes that push you back the way you came, but on a different thread.
You may move in and out of the screen a little, somehow never sacrificing readability.
It’s beautifully done: pen doodles converging with cartoon seagulls and dense, oaky forests.
Later on there’s a sci-fi cityscape with truly epic drops and some brutal chains of wall-riding.
A pleasure for the ears.
But this is a skating game, and these games are always two games in one.
But then you want to advanced-trick through a Ghost, don’t you?
Optional challenges tug you into seeing the level you just battled over as a series of fresh possibilities.
And then you’re through that barrier and the whole world is filled with possibilities absolutely everywhere.
Oh, those gaps!
(Mind them.)
So you sound out a world that is already intricate.
You sound it out for possibilities.
And you know, I recognise this feeling.
The writer John McPhee calls it Draft No.
He is talking about writing.
I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes."
Listen: those penciled boxes.
McPhee is talking about words that “fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity.”
You look for spaces where you’re free to do something a bit special.
A manual to link it to another trick, maybe with a grab.
And the world opens out a bit.
The sun is a little brighter in the sky.
(He wasn’t talking about skating games.)
And what could be richer than that?
OlliOlli World excels in this territory.
Oh the quality of poetry this game leaves in the reviewer’s notebook:Investigate the little cloud world.
In order: the cloud world allows you to access a couple of extra modes.
Blue triangles are optional levels on the map.
Pink shapes are side-quests.
And it’s a reminder to me that writing can be quietly physical.
Namely, the line!
Being partly in control, but not entirely in control.
Creator and audience combined.
Like writing, yes.
Likeskating, I imagine.
And that’s it: I love this game because it’s about learning and trying things out.
And maybe learning never has to end, and maybe we can try new things out forever.
