Games of 2009: Canabalt

It's fist-on-the-table, phone-flung-across-the-room frustration, but it's also genius. It's a constant, looming terror, one that stops me from ever feeling complacent, one that ensures my infinite flight from unexplained but obvious disaster is forever urgent and compelling. It's my Nightmare Boss, the great evil I must eventually face. And when I do defeat it, when I do calculate the smooth, graceful arc that sees my jump carry straight through the window and into the corridor behind: well, then I am King Of All Heroes. I love that I have so consistently failed to improve at dealing with a window - partly my own incompetence, but partly the game's forever-randomised course ensuring I can never, ever predict a window, and thus I can never plan for it.

All I ever need to do is press one button or tap the screen once, but somehow each and every time feels different - a new adventure in athleticism. That the creator didn't quite realise what he'd made, the subtlety and diversity of it: well, I can barely believe it. He's got to be some kind of hustler. It's equally triumphant in its storytelling and sense of world - creating so much from almost nothing. Greyscale pixels, no other characters ever encountered: but constant, apocalyptic shaking and the occasional background silhouette of something vast, deadly and robotic. It tells everything it needs to. The world is ending, and all you can possibly do about it is run away.

You'll always feel like you're running to safety, but you're only ever running to your death. You can't win. The only way the game can end is with you falling off a roof, colliding with a giant explosive or thumping into the unyielding brickwork above or below a ruddy window and sliding ignominiously to messy doom. Somehow, the knowledge of this never sticks. This time. This time.

I burn to know how it ends, even though it can never end. No words, no voices, but somehow it's created a sci-fi world I feel I know, and that I want to know more about. Granted, this is at least partially because I'm nerd enough that I can be made to fall for a fictional setting with depressing ease, but it's also because Canabalt's monotone vision of a near-future apocalypse is so complete and self-contained. I can see Blade Runner, I can see Another World, I can see Transformers, I can see Mirror's Edge.

I can see that I have to run.