Flywrench: Stop Thinking

As you bob, spin and bounce through Flywrench’s murky, space-basement obstacle courses, occasionally you confront an awful silence. You’ve taken too long, the soundtrack is telling you. Never mind that you’re still getting your sea legs amidst the grime and gravity, and never mind that traversing 23 levels in 4 minutes and 53 seconds might be an impossible task. Whatever masterfully nasty electro tune had been urging you forward has now reached its conclusion, and it’s all your fault. Your blissful hypnosis is suspended, your dance is unscored, and you are all alone.

In 2014, indie developer Messhof gave us Nidhogg, a gruesome and fast-paced game that distorts fencing into a territorial bloodsport and rewards its victors by sacrificing them to the titular Norse worm-beast. Each of its rounds play out like a delightfully violent version of rock-paper-scissors, distilling swordplay to tense, twitchy guesswork. Five years earlier, Mark Essen, who comprises one half of Messhof, successfully funded a game called Flywrench on Kickstarter. Two years before that, a free prototype of that same game appeared on the web. Last week, the finished version of that game finally dropped, and it seems the last eight years have been good to it. While Nidhogg’s simplicity is commendable, this new title is even more starkly refined in both color palette and control scheme. Messhof clearly has a knack for restraint — Flywrench looks and plays like it’s been tediously and tirelessly pared down to its barest, most brutal essentials.

And brutal it is. In Flywrench you are almost nothing: a small white rectangle, a spaceship striving feebly to overcome gravity. Again and again you destroy yourself, ramming the ship into the wrong line segments at the wrong times, flapping your wings too much or too little. From rapid and repeated failure you learn that your control over this vessel is far from precise. You aren’t so much flying as you are falling with style.

From Pluto towards Sol you planet-hop, framed by a laughable approximation of a narrative, flinging yourself in humiliating fashion towards the spinning square portals that promise a moment to breathe. As a shape resting on its edge creates a formal tension, so too do your reckless flight paths imply some natural order which you are apparently hell-bent on ignoring. You try to make the best of your nonsensical, God-given arcs and ricochets, but there’s no use. You just aren’t made for this world of straight lines and regular angles. Even so, you press on, banging dents into your keyboard with a slew of curses and probably a stupid grin. This is what makes Flywrench work; this is its wheelhouse. It’s cruel enough to make it clear that you don’t meet its standards, but maniacal enough to dare you to prove it wrong.

Formally and mechanically, the game is dead simple. But, like in any well-designed system, Flywrench’s foundational simplicity allows for emergent complexity through arrangement of its atomic parts. The controls never change, nor will you gain new abilities. Instead, limited to four arrow keys and two actions, you pick up a sense of rhythm and an understanding of the relationships among momentum, time, space and shape. There is no concrete or digital reward for your persistence, nothing to unlock aside from more levels, a deeper knowledge of the rules of this world and a tighter mastery of the physical constraints of your ship. As you approach the limits of maneuverability, you’ll notice something interesting, something that happens only with the fastest and most punishing of games: thinking will hamper you.

Surely you know this story. A tennis coach tells her floundering star in the midst of a particularly important and challenging match, “Stop thinking. Just play.” The player’s backhand, previously entrusted to muscle memory, had become useless when she started to think through the movement due to fear or uncertainty. But now she tries something else; now she lets go and allows her body to do exactly what it’s been trained to do — she stops thinking about playing tennis and just plays tennis. Suddenly she’s in a state of isolated action, giving herself over to pure and rich instinct. We hate to relinquish control, but the truth is that somewhere in our genome a line is drawn, and for our minds to try to claim ownership of what is written on the other side of that line only slows us down. We find ourselves at peak performance when we understand the balance of power between body and mind. We stumble, flub and stutter when we don’t.

Here’s another one. There was a game I played as a kid with my idiot friends. Maybe you and your idiot friends played it too. I like to think some idiot kids are still out there playing it. We called it Kill the Man with the Ball, though I’m sure it has other names. The rules of the game are straightforward: whoever doesn’t have the ball must attack whoever has the ball. Of course, you’re probably wondering why any kid would pick up the ball and willingly become the target. Reason tells us that the game should fall in on itself, because no one wants to be killed. But you and I both know that’s not how it goes. It turns out that everyone wants the ball. It turns out that the thrill of being chased outweighs the fear of being caught. It turns out that there’s a very real elation that comes from just barely surviving.

Flywrench lives inside that elation; it is built from the ground up to evoke it. It is a master-class of efficient game design that stabs you right in the brainstem. Again and again, taking advantage of its own simplicity, it introduces a new mechanic, then immediately kicks you out of the nest and expects you to fly. You, tasked with navigating turrets, gravity wells, pinwheels and moving barriers, will want to figure it out. You will want to stop and think. Listen to me: don’t think. Just play. Start moving. Trust yourself to improvise. Flap, spin, drift, glide. That’s all this is, just movement. This is Kill the Man with the Ball. This is a remnant of that gleeful, evolutionary euphoria of facing only one single moment and besting it. This is a testament to the joy of thoughtless instinct. Don’t think. Just fly.

Moments after the soundtrack’s thrum has faded away and seconds before it starts again, you’re still staring at the same jumble of technicolor lines in a state of sensory dissonance. You try to keep playing without an accompaniment, but now you’re a little more awake. Now you can hear your keyboard and your air conditioner. Your vision widens, and as the world surrounding the computer screen gets more vivid, you become aware of your posture, your actions, your self. There you sit, some creature of habit hammering away at a dopamine machine, altogether forgetting the body that supports the arm that supports the fingers feigning fluency in this unforgiving language of flaps and twirls.

When the music stops, Flywrench tells you one thing with certainty: you are an animal. But god damn if it isn’t fun.