by Semi Secret Software
Category: Games
Price: $2.99
Running is primal, driven by our deepest-rooted instincts. It was in us before we even knew what we were. Foot to ground, one following the other, with the body in a heightened state of focus – all senses and conscious thought focused elsewhere, on the trail of wounded prey, an escape route from certain death, or the closest men's room after a taco. Even now, we run in the dark of our dreams, although our hairless animal bodies sleep in high thread-count pajamas and twitch at the remembered scent of caramel frappucinos.
We are so in love with running, we gave special privileges to its name. We make our computers run programming code, we ask co-workers to run ideas by us, we run red lights, we run for president, we have good runs while they last, and we let Jay-Z run this town tonight. But running is not an ungrateful god, and in exchange for such linguistic ambiguity, gave back to our language a loose, limber flow. One could say the human race went from parkour to poetry (if one were to ignore the small matters of chronology and free running's French origins). Anyway, there's no denying they both start with the letter 'P'.
Canabalt is that poetry, that flow, that primal urge, distilled into a gray, retro-styled game you play with a single button. Its name offends the ear upon first encounter. What is that word, Canabalt? Is it some poncy European way of saying cannonball? And then the techno soundtrack starts up, and you swear upon your parents' lives the Europeans are behind this. But patience, young orphan. Take control of the anonymous protagonist as he launches out of the first window and keeps on sprinting over the rooftops below, and you might be forgiven for holding your breath. His automatic rightward movement, one foot after the other, broken only by the heroic leaps of your command, mirrors that latent programming in your own DNA. You enter a state of complete focus that transcends the small screen of an iPhone; sailing over the edge of a building onto the arm of a construction crane, rolling, then bolting off again, feels like a real rush.
Alien silhouettes stalk the skyline behind you and large objects fall into your path from above, but who has time to think about them? You just keep going. The absence of explicit narrative – is he running to, or running from? – hacks your own innate primordial code. Somewhere inside your head, your caveman ancestor is both running to safety and running to close the distance between his spear and his evil dinosaur nemesis. To those boring science types who insist that humans and T-Rexes did not coexist, I have only this to say: grow up.
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Positives: Addictive action that explains itself to anyone, online leaderboards
Unpositives: Failure stings and tastes salty.
Rating: 5 / 5
Buy Canabalt in the iTunes App Store.
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