Sometimes you need a palate cleanser. Last week I wrote about “Inside,’’ a scary, amazing, emotionally exhausting game that was unlike anything I had ever played before. This week, I enjoyed my time with “Punch Your Way to Heaven: DX,’’ a free, browser-based game by Chaoclypse (a.k.a. Brandon Yu) that is considerably more modest in its ambitions. (Thanks to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a great gaming site, for bringing it to my attention.)
“Punch Your Way to Heaven,’’ which was made for a game jam, greets you with some NES-era bleeps and bloops. You play as a muscled character in a lime green shirt who appears to be at the bottom of a pit. Other little guys drop into the pit and try to kick you. You respond by — as the game’s name suggests — punching them. When you punch them, they die, and you can use the bodies of your vanquished foes to climb higher and higher.
This may sound grisly — it may remind you, if you’re a “Game of Thrones’’ fan, of a particularly memorable recent episode of that series — but everything is so cartoony and ridiculous that there’s no “ick’’ factor. You just punch, punch, punch. Uppercut, jump, punch. Always climbing higher and higher. The only goal is to beat your high score; the game measures your success in height climbed.
Soon the enemies start to use not only their feet but pack guns as well, adding another element. The game’s physics are intentionally goofy — slightly nudging a corpse will send it barreling into the pile of other corpses behind it, perhaps causing you to lose your footing and slide back down a few feet. You constantly have to be aware of the “landscape,’’ which is ever shifting, as well as where your foes are and what they’re doing.
There’s an intentional looseness and sloppiness to the whole thing that reminded me of other gag games; I kept thinking of the much higher-production-value “Goat Simulator.’’ These sorts of games can be a nice counterpoint to the smooth, seemingly effortless polish of the “Insides’’ of the world. They’re a useful reminder of how much fun can be had at the medium’s more ragged, stoner-y corners.
Faced with a game this enthusiastically and self-awarely dumb, it can be fun to try to over-analyze. Maybe “Punch Your Way to Heaven’’ is a statement on the pointless, desensitizing drudgery of media and video-game violence: You just punch your way higher and higher and higher, climbing on the corpses of your enemies, forever. The only thing to do is to punch and kill more, to make the corpse pile bigger. And for what? What is your little green avatar thinking as he punches and punches and punches his way toward the top of the pit? Is there a top to the pit? Does the pit go on forever?
On the other hand: Meh. It’s just fun to punch people in a video game. Punch, punch, punch. Uppercut, jump, punch.
Jesse Singal can be reached at jesse.r.singal@gmail.com.
