Akka Arrh review - Llamasoft returns with intrigue and delight

I don't know if you've ever worked with oil paints, but the point of them is simple: you can move them around pretty much forever. Oils take an eternity to dry, which can be really annoying if you're delighted with what you've done and want to get it varnished. But the upside is absolutely filled with upness - it's front-loaded with upness. You place the paints on the canvas and you are absolutely not committing yourself to anything. For the next few hours and days you can take a brush and just move that stuff around, blending, reshaping, reworking, completely transforming whatever you touch.

Anyway: I think Jeff Minter works with code in a similar way. It's part of why his games are so hard to understand at first, or to be more precise why I have found that they're so easy to misunderstand. Oh, Space Giraffe is Tempest again? Well, maybe it was at first, but that's really just how he started out with the canvas. Then he started moving stuff around. And then he started moving that stuff around. And then he was reshaping, reworking, seeing what pleased him and rebuilding everything around that. Minter has said before that he doesn't see his job as rendering a set design document in code. Look back at his games and there's always a starting point - a template, often an existing arcade classic - that is then transformed by moving all the paint until something new emerges.

This is true with Akka Arrh, I think. In fact, maybe it's never been more true than with Akka Arrh. Minter has described his latest arcade treat as a real-time strategy game, or even a tower defense in which the player is the tower. Also this: it started its life as an Atari design that never quite made it to full production. True to form, when I started playing Akka Arrh, I started by mis-thinking. Oh, I said, this is Tempest again, but inverted. You're at the bottom of the well and at the top of the well. I had forgotten the process, of course. The reshaping, the reworking, the serious work of seeing what pleases from one moment to the next.

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