Generally speaking, computer game designers do not expect to fundamentally change the world with their creations. The best they can hope for is that their products will be considered fun and addictive, and that they will make some money. Then there's the newly formed onesong partners, who seem to be trying to uplift the people while keeping them glued to their terminals. The game is called Endorfun, it's being distributed by Time Warner Interactive, and it combines a very strong abstract puzzle game with psychedelic graphics, a worldbeat soundtrack and subliminal affirmations that make it one of the first "New Age" computer games. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Only you can be the judge.
Even the language of the instruction book overflows with tranquillity and well being. You control a "Light Body" which rolls across the "Unified Field." For those of us who aren't fully enlightened yet, this means you maneuver a multicolored cube across a flat grid. The object is to absorb "Life Force" blocks, which pulsate with the same nifty pattern as the faces on your cube. You must roll the Light Body so that it lands on top of the colored block with the same color on the cube's top. If this sounds completely counter-intuitive, it is, but within ten or fifteen minutes, you'll be absorbing like a pro. You can use either the mouse or the keyboard to coast your cube, though I very much prefer the precision of the latter.
There are also a number of other colored blocks that can be absorbed by the same technique, but they won't help you finish the level. Frequently, they "block" your path to a Life Force square, and you must absorb them first. If you move too slow, it is even possible to be hemmed in on all sides by the darn things, without a matching color in any direction.
This brings us to the issue of victory and defeat. Frankly, this is such a crunchy product, I was surprised to see the word "lose" anywhere in the manual. Surely some kind of feel-good euphemism could have been substituted. But the book does mention losing, which happens when you get trapped by the above-mentioned blocks, or you run out of time. If you lose, you still get a very pretty graphic payoff with a positive message in the middle of it. Something like "I am relaxed and centered", "I create my own reality", or "I create joyous creation". (I did not make any of those up.) On the other hand, if you win, you get TWO graphic payoffs, but the second one is a little more colorful than the first. WHEEEEEE.
The end of the game is not the only place those happy little messages pop up. They are woven carefully into the soundtrack as subliminal messages. The manual makes no bones about this. In fact it's one of the selling points of the game, as demonstrated by the slogan, "Play more. Feel better." All of the messages are listed in the back of the book, so you know you aren't being duped with something you'd rather not believe, like maybe "There is enough of everything for everybody, especially Time Warner Interactive." If you'd rather not receive their "benefit", you can turn off the music and play with the traditional clicks and beeps that usually accompany this sort of game. Unfortunately, you can't go in and edit which messages you hear and which you don't, so it's an all or nothing proposition.
Frankly, the soundtrack is beautiful and difficult to turn off. Onesong's musicians, The O Band, have created an intriguing tapestry of heavy percussion, clarinet, saxophone, guitar, wooden flute and voice. The vocal parts occasionally get a bit hokey, with chants of "Don't worry" and "Happiness," made worse by the fact that a sound file of no more than ten seconds is repeated over and over during each wave. Fortunately, there are a lot of these files to go around, and the waves are pretty short.
And then there's the visuals. While the gameplay may seem a bit basic, the backgrounds border on the baroque, pulsing with electric waves of color, waves that may not always complement each other, waves that occasionally cause serious eye strain trying to pay attention to the actual game. But most of the time the graphics are absolutely dazzling, and probably serve to increase the trance state under which you are the most receptive to the subliminal messages. But before you get too worried about this, realize that getting really involved in a computer game will put you into a trance anyway.
When you get right down to it, Endorfun is a pretty remarkable product. Not only does it have challenging and addictive gameplay, mind-blowing visuals, and a rockin' soundtrack, it also claims to make you a better person the more you play. After playing for a couple of hours, I must admit I felt a little giddy. Of course, that also might have been the coffee ...
