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Mask Quest review: the cops don’t have to breatheCanabalt from the blue
Canabalt from the blue
Image credit:increpare games / undef / Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:increpare games / undef / Rock Paper Shotgun
When I was a competitive long-distance runner at school, breath control was paramount. We were never really taught this, mind. It was an art you picked up through practice: how to breathe before the race, saturating your blood with O2 without dizzying yourself; when to permit the shorter, emergency breaths and when to apply restraint; when to deepen your inhales and charge yourself up for an attack on a hill.
And then, how to organise your bodyaroundyour breath, straightening your posture to expand your lungs without tipping back too far and squandering muscle power; how to breath in time with your stride and the movement of your shoulders, so as to firm up your momentum and shave a miraculous-feeling minute off your finishing time. All this, plus various daft psychological war gambits of my own devising. When overtaking or being overtaken, I used to seal my lips shut on that side and breath through the other corner of my mouth, to make it look like I was hardly out of breath at all.
Mask Quest Trailer (Out now on Steam - Windows/MacOS $9.99)Watch on YouTube
Mask Quest Trailer (Out now on Steam - Windows/MacOS $9.99)
Video games seldom require us to think about breathing, which makes sense given that most of us don’t really think about breathing, most of the time. There are a few in which awareness of your avatar’s lungs is a factor - you’ll hold your breath to steady your scope in Call Of Duty, and feel its absence in the woozy animations of a Souls character who’s out of stamina. But not till the brilliant, buffoonish, aggravating and disturbingMask Questhave I played a game that de-automates breathing and turns it into a mechanic, a button you must deliberately push and release to fill a cartoon diagram of your character’s chest with air. Fail to do so, and you’ll perish within seconds.
Image credit:increpare games / undef / Rock Paper Shotgun
Mask Quest isn’t an argument against protecting yourself from Covid, but in both the premise and the sparse, toilet-graffiti writing, it expresses massive ambivalence about the enforcement of social distancing: how it can be used as a pretext to thwart collective organisation, and above all, how it intersects with discriminatory policing.
It’s a study of systematic racism that appears to take inspiration (originally, another word for inhalation) from specific atrocities. I won’t spell the parallel out, or at least, not any more than Ialready have, but your character is Black, your enemies are all cops, and the whole game is one giant struggle to breathe. There is also, perhaps, an overlapping investigation of ableism in public spaces, though I don’t want to conflate ableism with racism. Again, the cops don’t seem to respire. In requiring you to do so manually, the game turns breathing into your disability.
Mask Quest really teaches you to hate cops. One of its nastiest touches is the text when you die, which resolutely blames the victim - never “a cop shot you”, but “you got shot”, never “a cop beat you to death”, but “you touched a cop”. Even as it monsters the old bill, however, it also transforms them into toys, reducing them to platform-game props with repetitive behaviours that can be reliably gamed, given immense concentration and persistence.
Some of them come bounding at you yelping yobbishly - time it right, and you can sneak under their leaps. Others stand there shooting monotonously in either direction. Some carry riot shields that function like pachinko bumpers, launching you diagonally and so, allowing you to reach areas you can’t jump to. Some hurl gas grenades that lock you spluttering in place if you try to inhale. Most despicable of all are the drones, which home in like wasps, even when you’re out of view; their movements are a bit ungainly, which occasionally lets you lure them into terrain traps, but also means they’re capable of surprising you.
Image credit:increpare games / undef / Rock Paper Shotgun
Puffing furiously at drones and statues looks very silly, of course. In general, Mask Quest walks a razor-thin line with its humour. It can be amusing when you fall into water, accidentally inhale and have to spit it all out when you reach ground. There’s a Charlie Chaplin-esque absurdity to doubling over coughing while hopping through tear gas, even as your last few percentage points of oxygenated blood dribble away. The writing is ridiculous: protestors shout things like “no U”. But the scruffy comedy never hides the ugliness. It’s of a piece with the unfairness. You are the butt of every joke.
Image credit:increpare games / undef / Rock Paper Shotgun
The cleverness of the game’s level design is as double-edged as the humour. It gracefully weaponises and politicises the casual sadism of any game that defines itself as a series of goals and punishments. There are moments, typically during your first few tries at a level, when you marvel at the ingenuity of it all, at how smartly and vindictively the more familiar platforming concepts mesh with the breathing constraint. Later levels are pleasingly abstract, all but discarding the city backdrop. You’ll ride platforms that travel gunfire-fast, obliging you to hop over bullets as you catch up to them. You’ll use those pachinko riot shields to soar over gas clouds and suck in a lungful of sky. There were many moments when I thought ofFez,Braid, and the other indie darlings of the Xbox Live Arcade era.
It makes me wonder - again channelling my memories of cross-country running - about how breathing mechanics might be incorporated into a variety of other games. Or whether there are any existing video game mechanics or routines, like scouting clear space in a bullet hell shooter, that could be productively reconsidered as respiration. But I’m not sure the aim here is really to add another tool to the game design repertoire.
Again, Mask Quest is punitive: I have died hundreds of times while playing it. The one bone it throws you is some extremely generous checkpointing, with rapid reloads, and sometimes this only steepens the failure spirals, as you throw yourself at puzzles that measure victory in pixels. I haven’t sworn aloud and ragequit so often for years, and this feels appropriate to a game that systematises injustice so hilariously, so horribly. The best outcome, perhaps, is that you stop trying to have fun and simply acknowledge that what’s being asked of you is enormously unkind.
