Life Goes On

 
Developer: Infinite Monkeys Entertainment Ltd
Steam Release: Apr 2014
Hours Played: 2.3
Similar To: Cloning Clyde / Escape Goat / Misadventures of PB W'Bottom / Tetrobot & Co / Vessel
Rating: 4/5 Parsnips

GAMEPLAY
With the Steam store now swamped with hundreds of platform puzzlers, the need to inject something different into such a game has become all the more important if developers want a bit of cred. Jumping about, pulling levers and clicking switches is all well and good but it's how you do those things that defines the game. Now while Life Goes On may not be the new Limbo, it certainly has that little something to make it worthy of an entry into my luscious garden. Set inside ominous caves and similarly creepy underground environments, you're first confronted with a series of contraptions of various kinds. Circular saws, painful looking spikes and searing flames are all there to be avoided. Your job is to spawn a knight in armour, negotiate past the said traps and grab the glowing gold gauntlet in a fanfare of glory.

BALANCE & PACE
Of course all is not that simple, for you'll soon discover that it is literally impossible to complete levels without dying. And here is where we get to the game's USP; you need to sacrifice knights and use their corpses to allow your final spawning knight to reach the elusive gauntlet. This may be by flinging onto a line of spikes so the next knight may tread upon you; getting ripped apart by a saw so that your bits land on a pressure plate to activate a crucial mechanism, or simply getting fired from a cannon to power-up the next checkpoint. Each death means you may summon a knight from the last activated checkpoint who then becomes the next link in the chain. With well-varied puzzles and using the full gamut of creatively designed levels, the result is that it all works and comes together incredibly well.  

PRESENTATION & DESIGN
The presentation is solid and the movement and animation of your knights work well as you trudge through the environments. You'll hang nicely to another impaled knight if you jump to the corner of a precipice and the ragdoll-physics accompanying each death along with the despairing screams are realistic and add humour (yes, humour). However, I couldn't help but be a little disappointed with the sound-effects: running and jumping is silent; there is no machinery noise and the summoning of a new knight makes a barely perceptible pop. Thankfully the switches, sawing noise and the burning of flesh that wipes all traces of a body make up for it. There is an heroic soundtrack played in the background but I found it to be quite bland and otherwise nondescript. 

PROGRESS SYSTEM
Life Goes On features three worlds (mines, mountains and castle) with each containing around 16 levels each but, with the makers stating there are four worlds with a total of over 65 levels altogether, there may actually be a hidden world to be unlocked. For each world, a parchment is laid out before you and a path of levels (with names to do with cups such as Cup of X or Cup of Y) unravel before. There are par-times if you wish to speed-run levels and "par-deaths" if you wish to complete them with as few deaths as possible but I figure most players won't be into that. Finally, on each level resides a strange round fluffy blob called Jeff. If you feed a knight to Jeff, you'll get a picture of his head under the level on the level-select screen.      

CONCLUSION

Winning-by-dying in a video game is not new. The iOS game Karoshi and, later, Squishy The Suicidal Pig both use the idea but of course none are on the same scale and scope as Life Goes On which takes the formula to a new and improved level and definitely makes it more of an innovation than a copied idea. Allowing the player to complete levels with least deaths as well as keeping records of best-times is also appreciated and Infinite Monkeys deserve praise for bringing that extra dimension into their game. You also get a nice animation of a knight with a wheelbarrow catching dead bodies and flags fluttering in the breeze with your score and time on them at the level completion - another good touch. So all in all, for those who like to give their brains a work out with a decent platform puzzler, I can definitely recommend this game.