SteamQuest is a series based around Pike’s quest to play all the games she has on Steam. Which is a lot. Her definition of “play”, here, is at least one hour for smaller games and at least three hours for more substantial ones. Feel free to follow along!

BIT.TRIP RUNNER
Developer: Gaijin Games
Genres: Platform, Rhythm, Arcade
Website: http://www.bittripgame.com/bittrip-runner.html – and the Steam Link
Time Spent by Pike: 71 minutes – unfinished

Bit.Trip Runner sort of reminds me of Robot Unicorn Attack. Both are about controlling a running character and having lightning-quick reflexes. Both have catchy music that entices you to keep playing. Both look like a technicolor rainbow barfed all over your screen.

There are a couple of major differences between the two, though. One is that the music plays a much more active role in Bit.Trip Runner, because your actions determine the music and vice versa. Another big difference is that, where Robot Unicorn Attack has two actions (Jump and Dash), Bit.Trip Runner has a whole bunch of them. Oh, and lastly, there are something like fifty different levels in Bit.Trip. Yep.

Now that you sort of have an idea of what this game entails, I’ll launch into more specifics.

Bit.Trip Runner has a sort of retro, pixel look to it. Inception-like, we go deeper and the retro gets even MORE retro when you unlock a bonus stage which is basically a parody of Pitfall (not gonna lie, the way the game even emulated the old-timey Activision logo at the bottom of the stage here made me smile). Appropriately, the music is chiptune-inspired electronica, and it’s very, very catchy chiptune-inspired electronica. You are rewarded with better versions of the music as you go along a level, because not only do your successful actions add little riffs to the song but powerups add more complexity and make the catchy music even catchier. This turns out to be a brilliant and unique hook because you want to beat the level not just to beat the level, but because it lets you listen to more and more great music.

The happy bouncy music and colorful aesthetics are in pretty hard contrast to how unforgiving the game actually gets. One mistake gets you ported to the beginning of the level. Yes, even if the goalpost is in sight and the actual level is as long as the Missouri River. There are no checkpoints. Checkpoints are for pussies. If you mess up, you get to redo the whole thing. It would be frustrating if the whole game wasn’t as completely addicting and entrancing as it is. See, once you sort of know how a level turns out, it becomes rather zen, and any mistakes just encourage you to try again, because, deep inside, you sort of don’t mind the repetition.

In fact, if I wasn’t trying to pump out this blog post before work, I’d still be playing right now, trying to beat this freaking level. (Watching this now and seeing how close the goalpost is to where I made it last time is absolutely maddening.)

So, in short, this is a solid, upgraded version of Robot Unicorn Attack, and fans of that famed flash game could do much worse than to check Bit.Trip Runner out. It’s on Wii and Nintendo 3DS aside from PC/Mac/Linux, and I do recommend using a controller instead of a keyboard if you’ll be playing it on a computer. The controls are more intuitive that way.