“Element4l is a challenge. The first time you play it, you will struggle… just like the first time you’ve learned how to ride a bike.”
This was the sentence that was written on the e-mail I got from I-Illusions with my copy of Element4l. If riding my bike had been this hard, you would have probably found me in a ditch with my neck broken that sunny afternoon when I took off my training wheels. Element4l has straightforward controls and a simple premise, and then uses those things to leave you a whimpering shell of your former self. It’s a system you can get very good at, one that looks beautiful when you learn it and everything is in full motion, but this won’t come easy. This game is designed to break you before it can be enjoyed, so expect a sharp uphill battle right from the moment you hit start.
I trusted the developers when they said the game was hard, but the music that played on the title screen and in many of the stages didn’t give me that impression. Element4l sounded extremely relaxing when I turned it on, playing some soothing music that seemed like it was designed to keep me calm. Many of the stage songs have an urgency to them, but it’s all still very low key. It shows signs of an upbeat tempo, but it does so in a subtle way that maintains its soothing nature while still showing some neat musical range. Also, somehow they managed to create calming songs with some dubstep in them, which is something that I only thought would occur when all planets were in alignment and some ancient doom stirred in its infinite slumber. I-Illusions made it work, though, so prepare for fire rain and other such signs of the end of days. Maybe buy some bottled water or something?
That music exists purely to quench the rage that was going to make me use my keyboard to cut my monitor in half. Element4l is as hard as its developers say, even though its controls are beyond simple. You play as a smiling, shifting elemental creature; one that can switch between being air, a rock, an ice cube, and a fireball. It costs a little bit of your energy bar to switch to any state besides ice cube or to use the powers that each state has. They’re controlled by the four directional keys, so it’s as simple as can be to control the game and switch between states.
If you’re thinking that you must use the WASD keys to move since the directional keys are already spoken for, you’d be wrong. This is where the game gets really hard, as you have no means of directing your little elemental beyond clever use of your powers in the environment around you. The landscape is covered in slopes and half-pipes in many areas, letting you slip along as the ice cube to build up momentum and execute some jumps. If you’re not moving fast enough, you can switch to your fire state to shoot forward a little bit, and if you won’t quite make a jump you can turn into air and hop across the gap. The rock can be used to break down any barriers in your path if something gets in your way, too, and can also be used to get some downward momentum during a drop. Knowing when to switch from one to the other is key to staying alive, and absolutely imperative to getting to the finish line.
I think this is the first game I’ve ever played where I rage-quit the tutorial. This game does not start off by going easy on you, as just learning how to work the momentum and state changes is a challenge. This felt like handing Super Meat Boy to someone who’d never played a video game, and I have a newfound respect for my few non-gamer friends when they pick up a controller for the first time. You only gain forward momentum in this game through very smart use of your powers, and it felt like the game was demanding a high level of skill right from the start. It’s probably for the best that it forces the player to get good with it in the tutorial, although it does create what felt like an overly-steep learning curve the second I started the game.
The game is extremely fussy about how the player builds up momentum. There were a lot of times when I turned into ice the second a slope began, only to find that I had hardly built up any speed by the time I was hitting the jump. I could use the fire power to move a little faster, but if I used it too close to an uphill shift in the slope I would slam into it and die. I often had to switch to my air power once I was airborne, occasionally throwing in a few fire shots to keep moving forward, and that was the only way I could get across many jumps. Still, it felt more like I’d forced the game’s system to get me through rather than using it in the right way.
You can only force the game so much, though. Your elemental has an energy meter, so after using your powers four or five times you have to wait for a short cool down before you can do anything again. This keeps players from being able to switch between fire and air to shoot across the level, or to just use air to fly over a tall obstacle. You have enough uses that you can sneak over most gaps and mountains despite a screwed up slide with your ice power, but only barely. Most of the time I had maybe a pixel or two’s width to get over the obstacle, and I literally sighed with relief each time.
The game tells you pretty directly how it works in its tutorial, but I never quite felt like I got the hang of it. The few times I got through with any semblance of skill were accidents, and nothing I could manage to repeat later. The game lets you brute force your way through a good portion of it by just continually using certain air powers and hoping you’d built up just enough speed to get through, but by the end of the game you need to have a better feel than I ever built to get through comfortably. The last few stages were huge slogs for me, each death bringing me that much closer to taking every ice cube in the freezer and holding them over a fire in front of my monitor. Maybe then that little grinning elemental guy would know I meant business.
Watching videos of this game being played showed me that the game is functional, so my difficulties with it are just my own. I just found that it was too hard to switch between states fast enough to do what the game needed me to do, that my reflexes needed to be spot-on form a very early stage. Just the same, Element4l is not something you’re going to learn by goofing off with a few times. You really need to play around with how each elemental state works, and pay very close attention to movement distances and slopes. If you even want to consider playing for time in this game and setting some decent records, just be ready to spend a long, long time getting the hang of how it works. It really is like trying to learn something completely new, as very few of the skills I’ve gained from years of games transferred to this game.
The game is fairly generous with checkpoints, which is pretty much the only reason I could get anywhere with it. They pop up every few jumps or so, and some of them even closer together than that, so once you’ve managed to limp through an area you won’t have to repeat it. That being said, the only reason the checkpoints are close together is because people like me are scrambling to complete even the simplest jumps some times. The checkpoint system is nice for the clumsy player trying to learn the game, and probably one of the nicest concessions they could give for the players who are breaking themselves to learn this control system.
Element4l also has a difficulty selection that can make it easier for someone who’s having a lot of trouble (me). It gives you more energy to use and makes the checkpoints even more frequent if you just want to see the end, but you can’t switch over a game in progress to this mode. It’s kind of a drag because you can’t just change the difficulty if you get stuck, but the beauty is that it does force you to restart the game all over again. That might sound stupid, but the game isn’t really that long, and the additional practice you get while replaying the old levels will probably make you good enough that you can return to the old difficulty.
This was a game that I wanted to have more fun with than I was having, though. Like in other hard games, it feels really satisfying when you manage to get through a tough area, but any time I did it in Element4l my victory felt clumsy and hollow. I felt like I’d abused the game’s system to just barely meet the passing criteria, and discouraged that I didn’t seem to be getting better. While this game is technically short, the practice you’d need to put into the game to get to a point I’d even call competent is just astronomical. I’m sure there are people out there who will understand it a lot faster than me, but it just felt too hard at times to want to bother.
The minimalist visual style and cute little elemental character did their best to interest me in the game. With all of the slopes cast in black like in Thomas Was Alone and Rush Bros it was easy to tell where I had to go, and the colored hazards and environmental changes also helped keep my path clear. The game was good at using that simplicity to lead me along the right path to the end, but it also hides many of the game’s secrets as well. The game uses its simple visuals to highlight the right path for novices, but someone skilled in the game could also see alternate routes and hidden areas. At one point I managed to build up enough backward momentum to go the wrong way down a hall, and came so close to a secret that I wanted to scream when I started to slide back, but the game’s simple visuals were the only reason I noticed the path at all.
Knowing where to go wasn’t the same as knowing what to do, and that’s where I had my most trouble with Element4l. It’s a hard game in that you really need to learn something new to play it, and despite its simple controls it’s in knowing when to hit the button that matters. Learning the skills you need to be anything more than a novice at this game are going to take a lot of time — far more than I wanted to dedicate to this brutal platformer, but I think there is a really great game here for people willing to give it the time. Like Bionic Commando for the NES, there is a simple joy in using the game’s unique movement system, and I just wish that I had the patience for it.
Element4l is available to download from the developer’s site or Steam.
