The appeal of You Have to Burn the Rope may have waned since it was released in 2008, but it is a game I will always love. In the past few years deconstructionist games have become a sub-genre unto themselves, but when I first encountered this little gem, I’d never seen anything like it.
YHTBTR is barely thirty seconds long. You play as a Kirby-esque character who must travel to the end of a corridor and defeat a boss by burning the rope holding a chandelier above it. That’s it.
Not only does the title of the game tell you exactly how to win, text instructions also appear as you move down the hallway just in case you didn’t take the hint. There is no challenge and no way to die. Some might argue this isn’t a game at all.
But at the same time YHTBTR is a perfect distillation of the experience of playing a platformer. Without any of the bells and whistles, the game somehow feels pure and makes me think back to my first experiences with video games when even their well-trodden elements were novel and exciting.
Maybe it’s all the little touches that make me love this game: the ambient background music, the little axes that don’t do anything, the catchiest credit theme since Portal. Maybe I’m just reading too much into a pointless little student project and mistaking it for Duchamp’s Fountain.
Whatever the reason, You Have to Burn the Rope will always have a special place in my heart, and it is a game I highly recommend experiencing for yourself.
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