Tremulous Thoughts: DATA WING
Aussie indie dev Dan Vogt delivers a clever 2D racer with an electronic heart — and for free, to boot.
Free games on mobile platforms, like how free services are offered on most parts of the internet, aren’t ever really free. Right? There’s always some catch to it in one way or another; you pay by looking at ads or buying into in-app purchases after you’ve played a bit and decide you’d like more. It’s how the business has kind of come to work in the years since gaming on our phones went from being a novelty to an everyday occurrence, from being a hobby to a billion-dollar industry.
Right? That’s how things just are, aren’t they?
Maybe that’s why I can’t get DATA WING, a racing game from the mind of Halfbrick co-founder turned indie maverick Dan Vogt, out of my head. It’s a fun, interesting take on the genre that combines the art of puzzle solving in one’s environment with the skill of blazing around two-dimensional tracks as fast as possible, with a story that punches above its weight in both characterization and emotional impact and a soundtrack full of hazy vaporwave jams.
It’s also 100% free. There’s no IAPs, no ads, no requests for you to buy anything else Vogt has been involved in whatsoever; the game’s content to just give you a link to the aforementioned soundtrack in Spotify playlist form, credits to the artists behind each song, and thanks to the people and tech that helped make the game happen.
Saying so feels weird, but the fact that such a well-made title is a free product on mobile platforms feels like a bona fide rarity. In a gaming landscape where the best gratis experiences tend to be smaller PC indie titles relegated to the pages of the wonderful-yet-little-known Itch.io, DATA WING is an idea given complete form, and it ends up being a unique and cool experience as a result of that.
In the game, you are cast as a Data Wing, a piece of software made for the purpose of transporting information across the memory of a cell phone. You work for MOTHER, an AI inside the phone with ambitions of becoming a human being and a master plan to do so. This narrative is given some additional context by providing bits of what’s happening beyond the screen of the phone you’re a tiny part of; over the course of the game, you can unlock garbled text messages and emails illustrating events in the life of your User.
If you were a fan of Thomas Was Alone’s juxtaposition of an electronically-minded storyline with a minimalist art style, DATA WING will feel like a bit of a homecoming, even though the two are very different in gameplay. Vogt meshes the humorous and the dramatic in a way that brings Mike Bithell’s witty debut to mind, and it feels just as natural here as it did for Thomas (though you may find yourself missing the brilliant narrative stylings of one Danny Wallace as a result).
While the plot impresses, DATA WING is first and foremost a stylish racing game, and in that capacity it excels. Vogt has noted his inspiration from classic titles in the F-Zero and Wipeout series as his primary source for where the gameplay mechanics come from, and in many ways the game feels like a top-down rendition of those. You’ll find yourself pulled into a trance as you try to master the art of pushing oneself off of the walls of each track, shaving every second you can off of your laps on the circuit and stopwatch levels. In its best moments, the game’s an exhilarating thrill that’ll leave you wanting more.
DATA WING makes a point of differentiating the kinds of levels you’ll be doing, too. Sometimes you’re tasked with just reaching the exit of a level. Occasionally you’ve got to race other Data Wings to the finish line. Other times you’ve got to get through individual checkpoints within a certain timeframe, and sometimes you just have to do really fast laps (or sets of laps, in certain cases).
Some of these work better than others; one level near the middle of the game that pits you against five other virtual players proved particularly frustrating, as did another where the gravity within the level was brought up without much in the way of walls to use to speed yourself up. Dealing with these is well worth the addiction you’ll get from the good levels, and I hope that Vogt returns to the game with more of them. (I’d pay for more in a heartbeat.)
If you’re anything like me, you’ll also find yourself digging the soundtrack. It’s a collection of hand-picked vaporwave tunes from some of the genre’s legends, with appearances from artists like 18 Carat Affair, Luxury Elite and ESPRIT Fantasy (aka George Clanton). As someone who previously only had a cursory interest in the genre, the selection here helped open my taste up to a new realm of sick beats, and it drew me further into what was already a brilliant game.
Vogt refers to the game as a passion project in the credits, and it shows. From its tunes to its plot, its aesthetic to the raw feeling of playing it, DATA WING has a confidence and hook that makes it a standout in the crowded world of mobile titles. If you’ve read this far, you should be playing it already.
DATA WING is available on the App Store and Google Play for $0.00.
