Bounding and bouncing, rhythm and time. Yoomp is one of the most enjoyable torus navigation games ever created. There is a tactility to the movement that exemplifies a sort of racing experience, yet spacing and pacing, in time to music are actually what make the game exceptional. Through movement, the racer ball that is your avatar makes a certain sound, and adding this to the background music creates a unique experience, an almost caustic understanding of spatial design and awareness. The bounding of the character is a relatively innocuous gesture, but one that is required and when combined with the sound, the appropriation of a timeliness with the music is acquired.
Similar to Rez, the game is less about the aggressive nature of space as much as how controlling the space creates an evolution in the space itself. In Rez, the metaphor is highly physicalized, while in Yoomp the interaction relates to audial reception. Indeed, playing the game without music, or not playing the game and merely watching, is missing much of what makes the game endearing. The ball itself has a certain cuteness in its bounce, which is hard to describe without the combination of tactility and audial quality.
Yoomp is a relatively short game, designed under the strictures of the Atari 800, the game is still remarkably smart in its usage of what is available to the hardware. There seems to be a great deal of belief in new technology paving the way to a brighter tomorrow, but if I am to look at our usage of the past, as this game was made long after the Atari 800’s death (which is to say, the hardware became outdated), there seems a great deal to be learned in the pragmatic aspects of game design by necessity.
Exploring that necessity is something Yoomp is excellent at. Though a simple combination of shapes, physics, and musics, the combinatorial mash-up that the player can create by interacting with the game is amazingly artful. By simply bounding through the game, each experience is a new piece of music, affected directly by your overt interaction in the play space. Few games, even music games, can make such claims about the player’s ability to overtly affect some aspect of the game so directly.
There is a sort of “design by fear” aesthetic that has taken hold over the passing decade, where interesting decisions are often axed as a result of their inability to be easily processed. Breaking the game, or redefining the game on new standards, is something that’s been dismissed by the increasingly cinematic structure of many games, rather than an experiential dynamic, which likely remains as strong as it is today because of the necessities of yesteryear. Yoomp is an experiment in the dynamic structure of the player making the game and having the freedom to redefine the experience.
Recommended: Yes