Review of Moose Life (PS4, PS5, PSVR, Oculus Rift, Valve Index)
Don Everhart, Contributing Editor
Moose Life, by Jeff Minter and Giles Zorzin is indelibly a Llamasoft game. That means the game has decades of arcade game sensibilities baked-in, and that there’s an interest in doing something new, in developing the form. Playing it is like exploring the most recent development of a branch that grew very close to the base of the videogame tree. In VR, it feels like pressing up against the CRT of a stand up arcade cabinet and finding it permeable, then diving inside.
Image: Moose Life’s colorful horizon.
Once inside, the player is surrounded by the colorful pixels of an 80s arcade game, but rendered around them in three dimensional voxels. There’s a floor and a ceiling on an endless track, on which players control a psychedelic glowing moose. Press a button and the game starts. Trance music pumps through headphones. The moose moves without friction, sliding forward, side to side, backwards. Press another button and the moose flips upside down, sliding along the inverted plane of the ceiling.
Image: Certain power-ups can produce herds of running stags that can either stampede towards the player or into enemies.
Enemies appear. First small, UFO-like things that drop glowing caltrop-like mines, exploding your moose into a shower of glowing squares. Press another button, and the moose shoots them first. Get some momentum, grab some power ups. Hit multiple enemies at a time in an endless spray. Chaos ensues. There are waves and waves of enemies, UFOs and geometric chains, and robots that speak “destroy” in tinny sound. There are forests of mushrooms to sweep off the plane and sheep to be rescued, turning your moose purple and rendering it temporarily invincible. The faster you charge forward, the more chaotic it gets. It’s a ride and an improvisation. Space warps around you—the moose can slide backwards, but enemies that were ahead may cycle behind, like the whole world is running on the interior of a treadmill.
Somewhere around there, it occurred to me that I may have been holding my breath. Moose Life is an accomplishment in virtual reality, which I was only recently able to discover myself thanks to its port to PlayStation VR. I’m a long-running fan of Llamasoft games, which is largely synonymous with Minter. He’s been making independent games for 30 years, and Moose Life is a welcome new development suffused with the style and history of his previous games.
Moose Life follows arcade logic. As you go, new enemies and obstacles appear. They aren't identified and it's up to the player to just...play and figure it out. Each is identifiable in its own pattern. Recognizing those patterns is as key as it is in Robotron, Galaga, or any number of shoot-’em-ups (shmups) from R-Type to Darius. There's so much sensory overload; the trick is to reach for the elements that you can quickly recognize and respond.
Image: Moose Life produces moments of grand chaos that are made navigable by its wealth of audiovisual cues and straightforward arcade design.
For fans of Llamasoft’s work, this should be familiar. Their most recent games have found Minter riffing on the past, with TxK (2014) and the nearly-identical Tempest 4000 (2018) iterating on his Tempest 2000 (1994) and, of course, Tempest (1981). He and Zorzin have been experimenting with VR for the last few years, beginning with versions of Tempest-style claws, waves, and geometrical planes and moving into shmup territory with a demo for Minotaur Rescue. In 2017, they released some of their results as a version of the mythologized, fatally seductive Polybius. Moose Life is the next step.
While Moose Life builds on that history, it also shows that Llamasoft are ready to strike out into newer territory. Some of the warmest touches of this are the brief bits of prose that hover at the conclusion of each level. These reflect a range of thoughts, including Minter’s appreciation for fuzzy creatures, Eugene Jarvis, and Basingstoke, UK. Some also contain self-deprecating remarks about Llamasoft’s level of artistic skill or sarcastic comments about Brexit. This adds a disarmingly personal touch to the surreality of Moose Life, and also a curious level of context. The moose is there because large fuzzy things are friendly. Sheep are to be collected because Minter and Zorzin consider them to be great pets. The color scheme and robotic monsters are reflective not only of Minter’s previous works, but are also in homage to Jarvis.
Image: For Yak and Giles, nothing is more important than making sure the sheepies are safe.
This approach is deeply refreshing. In an industry that increasingly and relentlessly promotes a certain vision of photorealism as the pinnacle of its artistic ambition, Llamasoft has released an entrancing and personal game that twists and explodes the often neglected genre of Jarvis-style arcade shoot-’em-ups. It’s simply a blast to play.
For more in “History’s Arcades,” check out the introduction on Walter Benjamin and arcade spaces and Christian Haines’s article on The Medium, history, and haunting.
