Thirty Flights of Loving

My time-played on Steam doesn't amount to the actual total time I've spent playing this game. Between the stand-alone download, the Itch.io download, and this, I probably have close to 5 hours on this 15 minutes (tops) game. Why is that? It's my humble opinion (and I'm no authority on this, so take it as you will) that Blendo is one of the 21st centuries greatest video game designers - period. His works span a plethora of artistic knowledge that reaches from novels, movies, music, and the canvas. Not only does this game take visual literacy from some of the world's best heist movies, it also creates it's own video game visual language. This is something that not even the largest of AAA game releases can say confidently. It's a bold expression of love for art and life. It's a game that does what any great book aught to: it makes you happy, and it makes you sad - do that, and you've done the minimum, but do it in 15 minutes in the Quake II engine and dazzle the player every time with it...

It's 2025 and this is game design history. In a niche of a niche of a niche, in a world that hardly exists anymore, Thirty Flights of Loving was the indie that whizzed past me time and again. The refined beats and raw essence of a crime-caper story, bolstered by the underlying (literal) commentary from Blendo Game developer Bredon Chung. This is an art piece and a game. Short but bursting with the flavors of experimentation and asking "sooooooo....what is a game??". Will I return to it? probably not. Did it have an immediate impact on me today and a temporal wallop from 13 years of playing, watching and absolutely smothering my little, shriveled brain in games nonsense? Yes. Yes it did. If you were a game-obsessed weirdo in the 2010s and feel like you're way too passionate about indie games at the drop of a hat, this will speak to you on some level. If none of this sounds like you, give it a shot anyway. It's short film theory and narrative applied to subtractive game design and it sl...

This was a great game, I need more of this