THE 10 BIGGEST PLATFORM GAME CLICHES

10/7/2018

I do love a good 2D platformer. The best ones manage to lob new ideas at you with every stage, but even then (with - admittedly - a fistful of exceptions) there are certain tropes and conceits which seem to appear in every single one of them.

I've never understood this about games; why - just because a game has a certain style - do they insist on adopting ideas, visual cues, and gameplay from all the other games which came before? Yeah, alright, they generally do their own thing too... but from Donkey Kong, through Pitfall, Miner 49er, Pac-Land and the watershed that was Super Mario Bros., ideas were introduced which were - and there's no less accusatory way of saying this - stolen by all which followed.

Of course, there have been exceptions - typically, when the aesthetic is more realistic than cartoon animal - but, for what it's worth, here are the 10 biggest cliches in platform game design.

OPENING LEVEL WITH BLUE SKIES AND LUSH FOLIAGE

It's the law, kids: platform games MUST begin with an opening stage set in some idyllic countryside or woodland, area.

Blue skies, green grass, trees, flowers... Now that I'm writing this, I'm wondering whether this is subconsciously - or maybe consciously - inspired by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. You know: because Bilbous and Freddo started out in The Shire before heading on their big adventure.

Either way, do not be fooled: this opening level is no safer than anywhere else. Yeah, you might get a few question marks scattered around, which tell you what to do... but the local fauna will still wound you if you so much as brush your stomach against it.

Imagine if the real world was like that; if everything you encountered made you leap up into the air with an audible shriek, cause lacerations across your entire body, and make you drop your wallet or purse.

"Oh no! I bumped into a kitten! Shrieeeeeeek! My pennies!! My travelcard!!!"

SNOW LEVEL

It doesn't matter where your game is set, sooner or later you'll end up in an ice world. And that means this: platforms which are all slippery and that, even though nobody enjoys that particular gameplay notion.

Also, chances are you'll get some sort of downhill bit, where you're snowboarding, or frozen in a block of ice, or whatever. And the things you've been tasked to gather will be frozen in blocks of ice that you have to smash through before you can get to them.

And while I think about that, why do none of your enemies ever try to collect the power-ups before you do? S'stupid.

LAVA STAGE

Yep, every platform game has to have a lava stage. Cue: spurts of erupting lava, a big lava monster thing that spits fireballs, and rafts which sail across the lava. Some games will switch out the lava stage for a level set above some manner of toxic lake. Some will have both. I care for neither.

Can't we have something new? What about a nice wetland, or tundra? And don't say "How about a level set in a castle or a toy box?", because I will elbow you in the throat.

UNDERWATER STAGE

Ugh. The worst moments in any platform game are the levels where you're forced to swim.

"Yeah, you know all that jumping and running that you've really enjoyed? Well, we're going to take all that away from you now, and put you in a level where the controls feel all wrong, and you have limited oxygen, and everything around you is deadly."

Also, again... the seas and lakes of any platform game world are even more dangerous to swim in than going for a dip in Australia. So venomous is the aquatic life that making contact with even the smallest fish will cause a medical emergency.

COLLECTIBLES

Where do the rings, and coins, and balls of wool, and musical notes come from? Why are they floating in the air? What is the significance of this? Why do you always get an extra life when you collect 100 of them?! Why are the things often hidden inside other things? Why is your character the only one concerned with collecting the things? Context is everything. Platform games have very little.

FLOATING PLATFORMS

Yeah, sure... they're called platformers, and so you expect there to be some platforms... but why are so many of them just hanging there in the air with no visible means of support? Then you get the ones that crumble or fall away a second or two after you stand on them, or the ones which move up and down of their own volition, or the ones on some sort of floating, mid-air, rail. WHY?!!?

HOW?!?

DESERT STAGE

Oh yeah. The inevitable desert stage. Spiky cacti, quicksand, columns of sand erupting inexplicably from the ground; you know the drill. Frequently, running across the sand of a desert level will result in your character slowly sinking into it. Imagine if every beach was like that.

"Where's little Timmy gone?"

"He's vanished, swallowed by the sand... He must've stood still for too long..."

JUMPING ON A LIVING THING WILL KILL IT

Yes, fair enough. If you were able to leap twice the height of the average person, and then land atop them feet-first, you'd probably compact their spine, or something.

The question is: why is this the default method of attack in the vast majority of platform games? There's a reason why contact sports don't feature two opponents leaping repeatedly into the air, trying to land upon one another; it is not a particularly advisable form of combat. And it would look stupid.

LEVELS THAT SCROLL AUTOMATICALLY

Why does this happen? Anyone got any ideas why, having previously had full control over whether you can go forwards or backwards, platform game makers will force you suddenly to keep moving ahead, lest you be trapped behind a lump of scenery? In the same sort of ballpark, you can also tag train-based levels to the arse-end of this irritating trope.

THE WEAKER END OF LEVEL BOSSES GET, THE TOUGHER THEY GET

Normally when you've been beaten up, you get weaker the more punishment you receive. Not so in platform games. When confronted with a boss, they don't weaken gradually; they get stronger, saving their most deadly attacks for those moments right before they die. They'll go red in the face, or start spitting out enemies that you've encountered earlier in the level, or suddenly acquire the ability to turn into a tornado and fire lasers out of their eyes.

To be fair, most real-world bosses - corporate CEOs and the like - can probably do this too.

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37 Comments

Col. Asdasd

10/7/2018 09:12:32 am

- Run left at the start of the stage for a secret
- Any weapon with a parabolic arc is the best weapon in the game
- A gaping hole where an indie developer shamelessly reamed their childhood for ideas for his retro puzzle platformer
- A score system which usually felt archaic and vestigial even at the time

Ben XO

10/7/2018 09:43:19 am

Don't forget "sticking two zeroes at the end of the score to make it look more valuable", a bit like what my electricity meter does

10/7/2018 10:02:41 am

I vaguely remember a game where the Japanese translation was done on the cheap, so the manual promised you 'loopts' instead of 100 pts for an enemy

Mr Santa

10/7/2018 09:31:23 am

I think I can trace the cause of my OCD and hoarding issues in later life back to collectibles in games. Somebody should make a platformer where you learn to let go.

Letting go in platform games

10/7/2018 10:09:55 am

Usually down + A, isn't it?

Chris

10/7/2018 10:41:09 am

Maybe a platformer where you return all the collectables to their correct places in the levels?

DEAN

10/7/2018 10:04:41 am

I love me a decent platformer but, very sadly, most are shit.

It's of interest to nobody why some of them are shit and it's also not worth asking why a good one is good unless you are a bored/boring person.

That all said, I think Mario is good because the player must take responsibility for his actions at all times and that Sonic is bad because sometimes you just watch a little blue ball being flung about.

Beyond that even, Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom has a wonderful amount of unhinged imagination about it - it seems free from cynicisms shackles. Sonic, on the other hand, screams of committees and boardrooms of men in ties that know best. You know the sort - all posh watches and dandruff.

Imagine working for a company that exudes office energy - let's say Ubisoft. Imagine presenting a game like Mario there...

Now consider Rayman - an abomination of jaded despair.

Games, like any creative fruit, need to come from a good place and most really don't. I read yesterday how a creative person is not motivated by money and it made me smile because it reminded me how the world doesn't have to be a big old pile of shit.

Anyway, more to the point, have Ubisoft EVER made a decent game? I honestly don't think they have. Not one I've liked anyway.

10/7/2018 10:41:32 am

Yes: Child of Light.

Child of Shite more like, right? Right??

10/7/2018 12:23:55 pm

Child of Light has some of the worst writing I've encountered in video games, attached to a mediocre RPG. The art is nice I suppose, but big deal.

10/7/2018 03:32:58 pm

Sorry, Chris - it's a Child of Shite for me too, I'm afraid!

10/7/2018 03:48:13 pm

Screw you guys. It's a pretty, side-scrolling sort-of-platformer RPG (and, yes, it's not a heavy RPG by any means, but it doesn't pretend to be). It's at least trying to do something different, rather than being a boring map-mopper with photo-realistic (ie. dull) graphics, like the rest of Ubisoft's output.

*I* enjoyed it anyway. *Goes off to the corner to cry*

mikeyc

10/7/2018 11:59:20 am

NO: Sonic is GOOD and a lot weirder than you give it credit for.

10/7/2018 03:36:54 pm

I think I know what you mean and sure, it's is pretty odd really BUT compared to Mario? There's no way Mario would get green lit today - think about it. A hedgehog with attitude surely would.

superfog

10/7/2018 12:30:39 pm

Best thing, for me, about platform games is I get bored after the first couple of levels, which is about the amount of content you would get on a "demo" disk on the magazines back in the olden days...

10/7/2018 12:34:00 pm

You don't seem your usual self, DEAN!

I don't mean to assume that I know the 'real' you at all, but from your comments you do come across as a more cheerful, glass-half-full kind of person. Not in a naive way, more in a 'don't let the bastards grind you down' sort of sense. Hope everything's ok!

Anyway, as a person who is often bored, and even more frequently boring, I'm quite happy to take you up any time on the subject of shit games, platformer or otherwise.

I have to say I'm broadly sympathetic to anyone who will champion Mario over Sonic, and you're quite correct that that 'hands off the controller' game design makes for something that's better watched than played - you could make a case that Sonic was the original interactive cutscene game, full of long cinematic sequences of chutes and loops with the occasional button input required to prevent you from a sudden and untelegraphed death.

At least QTEs have the decency to show you what button to press and when!

In terms of aesthetics though, I don't think there's that much more than a cigarette paper between the series. For me both series started bright, bold and iconic, which is a large part of why they became so successful - the visual element of a game is always important for pulling the punters in, kids are (maybe) especially susceptible to charming, effective design. Everyone and their Granny knows who Sonic and Mario are.

Stagnation has set in though. I think both series have struggled as they've gone on to keep iterating new visually interesting ideas. For the Sonic games this meant a dreadful rut where they kept on churning out animal friend after animal friend, far exceeding the appetite of any but the most sexually degenerate, while the 2D Marios made an awkward transition from charming sprites to a never entirely convincing or cohesive 3D art style.

Traditional Rayman is, as you say, a monster, and an indictment of the Playstation-and-onwards era's inability to create platforming mascots with genuine iconic appeal (see also: Crash, Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Pratchet, Blinx etc). HOWEVER they have redesigned him extensively since the early games into something much less offensive - this combined Origins and Legends being rather beautiful games has definitely redeemed the series aesthetically, and while a touch overrated, they're also pretty damn good to play.

And on that last point about Ubi decency: it's a problem they could have avoided, but Ubisoft are perhaps at least partly victims of their own success. I'd argue that the original Ubigame, the open world map-mopper, whether you're looking at Far Cry 3 or Assassin's Creed 2, WAS a decent game. Unfortunately too decent, to the extent that it was turned into a template and mercilessly replicated both by them and the rest of the industry, until we were all sick to the back teeth of it.

If those two games had been left as the only examples of their type, I'm convinced we'd consider them classics. As it is I'll be happy never to play another like them for another half-decade.

What?

10/7/2018 12:42:36 pm

I'm not a Sonic fan, but what Sonic games are you guys playing? You seem to be describing a Sonic game as viewed through a misty window, or an opinion cobbled together from viewing a number of screenshots and a vague game description. But it's a really old game now, there's many ways of finding out that isn't true.

I'd also argue the internet's current obsession with 'iconic' design is fatally flawed, as such descriptors are assigned after the fact

10/7/2018 12:58:32 pm

I grew up playing these games. Obviously there's more to them than the caricature I drew, but I'll maintain that you're only completely and deliberately in control of your actions after playing a level through three or four times and committing it to memory. Before that you'll experience significant stretches where you're reacting (or failing to react) while the game propels you forward. The comparison to a QTE was facetious, but only to a point.

And I'm not obsessed with iconic design, or iconic anything; I just have a limited vocabulary and it's a word that I associate with 'good-looking'!

10/7/2018 03:45:06 pm

Nice one, Colonel, and very astute too!

It's all going on at the moment and yeah, I guess you're right - I'm not my usual chipper self. Funny thing is, though, I was laughing when I wrote my comment this morning and it's only since you mentioned it that I noticed it seemed a bit blue.... and spiky.

DEANdetractor

10/7/2018 12:37:14 pm

I dunno how you are thinking of the storybook, well-worn and corporate aesthetic of Mario as more exciting than the colourful and gorgeous recent Rayman games

10/7/2018 03:48:18 pm

I've played those Rayman games (one lives in in hope) and I've played Mario Odyssey. No comparison.

Granted, Odyssey is not a watershed for the franchise but, good golly, it's.... I'll put it like this - better than any Rayman game ever, ever, ever!

Mazza

11/7/2018 09:39:40 am

Odyssey came off as cheap and hollow to me, with obvious paths to follow and tasks to complete. But then I didn't play through past completing it

Torry Redditch

10/7/2018 12:51:52 pm

S'up with the Rayman hate, Myself and almost everyone i know love most of the Rayman games,My brother was lucky enough to have secured a placement at the much respected Wayne Day Institute in 2006 so for obvious reasons had no ways of playing any games at all while enrolled in the institute but before he left he and i would love to play all the previous games, when he achieved all he could at the institute and came home in 2013 i meet him with a copy of Rayman Origins and when we fired it up he did all he could to hold back the tears, can anything that does that to a 52 year old really be thsy bad?

Nah mate i'm with you mate don't know what they're talking about pal

10/7/2018 12:58:38 pm

Origins and Legends outstrip any dull-as-dishwater 2D Mario released less than 2 decades ago

10/7/2018 04:22:32 pm

I feel bad now, Torry, but.... nah, you're right; can't be that bad.

Meatballs-me-branch-me-do

10/7/2018 12:57:53 pm

The Sonic levels like Marble Zone where you need to carefully negotiate traps and moving objects are excellent.

Spiney O'Sullivan

10/7/2018 03:56:23 pm

The Marble Zone is great precisely because it's an inversion of the Green Hill Zone in a way that makes you rethink the play mechanics of the game. The momentum that made Sonic so easy to play with in a big open space is suddenly a liability that you have to adapt to and work around skillfully.

If every stage was the Green Hill Zone, the game would be 5 minutes long and rubbish.

Geebs

10/7/2018 06:47:15 pm

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was great. People seem to like Beyond Good and Evil, as well.

Spiney O’Sullivan

10/7/2018 10:17:17 pm

That year was a golden age for Ubisoft. I’d barely been aware of them for my entire gaming life, and then in the span of about a year they released PoP: Sands of Time, Beyond Good and Evil, and XIII, all of which were interesting and original. Mich like Activision, who had an early 2000s streak go excellence, it’s a shame to see their name become a byword for copy-paste committee-designed annual releases and questionable marketing practices.

Bob Trousers

10/7/2018 10:35:05 am

I play-tested a platformer recently. It had every single one of those tropes, I'm fairly certain. Add in Haunted House, bosses needing to be hit three times, underground cave levels, a little trick type of thing for bonus points of no discernible value at the end of every level. It had every single one.

Damon link

10/7/2018 10:41:25 am

Over at VGJunk there's a running complaint that BUBBLES damage players. Lava bubbles OK but normal water-and-air BUBBLES can hurt a character that can smash the skull of various animals with his feet.

Bubbles. Also: Water droplets.

Kelvin Green link

10/7/2018 10:51:25 am

I remember being overjoyed when I discovered there was a secret level inside that Alex Kidd octopus pot.

Biscuits

10/7/2018 12:39:20 pm

Is there a dark, grim platformer? How about a downbeat one? Must they all feature ghastly cutesy abominations? Was anyone on Earth at all like 'Oh, great, I can't wait to play as those characters!' when they unveiled the hideously ugly Yooka Laylee character designs?

Jol

10/7/2018 04:04:49 pm

Limbo comes to mind, but it's more about puzzle solving than bouncing around floating platforms. It's dark and features you dying a lot in quite horrible ways. It's probably about something super serious like depression but I just remember getting killed quite a lot.

There's also Salt & Sanctuary, the 2D Souls-like thing. It's quite fun too.

colincidence link

10/7/2018 06:34:47 pm

some sentiment of
Well, of course a platform game is gonna start in a cosy environment and later undertake different extremities and elements as we know them on Earth. Like, as much as those are clichés, there are only so many environments we can fathom, 'cause, like, nature.

Robobob

10/7/2018 08:03:19 pm

So if we're not doing the bog-standard lush forest/vegetation, ice, desert and lava levels, what's the alternative platform level settings?

The correct answers are:

Savannah
Moon (shonky gravity instead of slippy ice)
Industrial Wasteland (entirely empty apart from the odd lump of rubble & bricks)
Custard (lumpy, so you can't drown, just slows you down annoyingly)
Center Parcs (potential for squirrels and lyme disease)
Canal Zone (half-submerged shopping trolleys,tramps,and enemies on boats slower than your normal crawl speed)
Tails' Colon

Irregular Shed

10/7/2018 08:16:09 pm

No mention of double jump? Not only can you jump ridiculously high but you can also, near the apex, launch yourself off thin air and jump EVEN HIGHER. When I tried that I broke my wrist.

Marro

13/7/2018 05:24:56 pm

Manic Miner is the only pure, unsullied platformer. Maybe because it was coded by a virgin (I'm guessing Matthew Smith hadn't been laid before coding Manic Miner - the drugs and groupies would only come later).
Everything after, including Jet Set Willy, is vice and corruptible seed!! All hail Miner Willy! The day of the descending foot is upon us....

THE 10 BIGGEST PLATFORM GAME CLICHES

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