GD: The Beginning of The End: Analysing Tutorial Levels in Platformers

As with any genre of video game, introducing gameplay is a vital part of platformer games. However, platformers in particular are notorious for either revealing too much or too little through their tutorial levels: either you are thrown in with no idea what's happening, or your hand is held for too long. A particular favourite platformer of mine, The End, might fall under the second category a bit more.

It starts off fairly incongruously: you're given basic directions to walk, and so you walk.

This part essentially acts as opening credits: sponsors are announced, the game title is dropped, when suddenly:

You're frozen in place as a meteor comes plummeting down to earth! Your actions are limited, you cannot use your new walking powers! What will you do??

Embrace the inevitable, it turns out.

Welcome to the afterlife.

The muted colour scheme and suspended gravity make it obvious you're in a pretty dark situation, in an alien environment very unlike the suburbia presented before. You're also suddenly acting like a source of light-- what's up with that? (Establishing a new power to be explained later, that's what.) Your walking powers are renewed, and so that's what you do.

One of the first mechanics introduced is that of the slide-- it speeds up your downward progress, but...

You can't go back up again. No backwards movement in this game. At the bottom of this hill, you meet your first shadowy figure.

These guys serve to set up the expectations of the game: Get To The End. They're rather intimidating creatures, especially when viewed in the light of day, but as they're serving as points of exposition their level of intimidation drops. They're here to help as much as hinder you. As much as their adversary is highlighted, they're also useful sources of information. (They're also technically 'part of you.')

Here we see the Guardian of Body being an adversary,

And the Guardian of Spirit being a guide. It's a pretty hamfisted way to set up explanations to play the game, but it also establishes the main themes: you versus yourself, mind versus spirit versus body, and personal exploration.

The Guardian of Spirit also shows through forced feedback the details of your Light Power: once you enter the beam of light, your shadow self disintegrates and you become your corporeal self again.

And once again you get your little hints on how to interact with the environment. They're not exactly diegetic, but they're useful.

 Once you enter the door, you're in the lobby of the game. Each area corresponds with a Guardian, and each clearly has 'collectibles' that you need to obtain. It doesn't really matter where you start off, as every area has its own individual starting area that introduces its own individual gameplay assets.

 We're going with the Mind World (it's the prettiest).

And again, we have the little hints hanging around. I'm not sure why they need to remind you how to walk, but maybe it's to set up the idea of these tutorial !!!s, as they show up a lot around the place.

Like here (establishing jump length),

Here (introduction of interactibles like levers and vines),

And here (reminder of Light Power ability.)

Now, the game could easily be played through trial and error to figure out how these work (the gap in the Light puzzle is too big to jump, the lever stands out from the organic nature of the environment, clearly there must be a jump part of a platformer game) but this game is what some people may consider to be 'casual,' so the developers made it as easy to navigate as possible for the assumed 'lowest common denominator' of players. Each mechanic is introduced as integrated parts of the environment, and within very short distance of each other (it's a pretty short level anyway) so it's enough to keep the player interested without necessarily being challenged too much. The difficulty will ramp up with each level, and you can choose to challenge yourself by collecting all the stars or completing the level in the time given to you.

There is, however, one particular part of this level I'm rather miffed about.

Here you can see there are three levers to pull. The first one drops a spiked ball on your head, killing you, the second one drops you into a pit of spikes, also killing you, and the final one opens a door to let you continue to the end. This is perhaps the first instance of trial and error in the game. Why make both levers traps without making such treachery anticipated? Is it to establish the lantern as a checkpoint (when you die, that's where you resurrect)? Why did both levers have to kill you? It'd make me wary of the third one, to be honest. This isn't really the difficulty ramping up, this is just cruel.

Here's the final part of the level, with our friend the !!! again. The door mechanic has already been explained, but we haven't encountered these kinds of doors yet so the location of the tutorial reminder kind of makes sense. You pick up a key earlier on in the level and you open one of the doors to complete the level. Part of The End is that it's kind of a personality test: each level ends with a question like this, and once you complete all of the questions it will give you a Personality Profile based on your choices. Essentially, what you were when you were alive. Spooky, huh?

Here's a clip of me playing these parts, in case you wanted to see what it was like. Sorry about the video quality: you can only play The End in windowed mode, so I had to cut it down a bit.