The remake of La Mulana has finally been released, and it is good – probably the optimal way to experience this impressive game. Consider that the review portion of this article, and go buy it : now let’s jump into why the game is interesting.
It is well understood that La Mulana is a love letter to times past. The Japanese freeware game, released in 2005 by Nigoro and translated into English by Aeon Genesis that same year, was crafted in the style of games made for the MSX , a computer system architecture that was popular in Japan in the 1980s but virtually unknown in North America. La Mulana, in its original release, takes its interface, graphical style, and even game design from games released on that hardware.
While La Mulana is apparently based in particular on a game by Konami called Knightmare 2: Maze of Galious , its style owes itself to a wide variety of games that were popular on the MSX. To my eyes (and this is perhaps a case of Kafka and his precursors), La Mulana owes at least as much to games like Dragon Slayer and its sequels , a long running series from Falcom whose only English release was its fourth, Drasle Family, which was released in North America as Legacy of the Wizard for the NES.
Each of these games are grand adventures, told in a series of intricately related screens that combine to form gigantic mazes full of locks, keys, and secrets. Many of them resemble the genre that has come to be known as the Metroidvania , but in a more compact form; because the MSX had difficulty processing scrolling graphics, each screen is distinct, its own field related to the whole. The relative size of the tiles and sprites in those screens means that each is its own piece of the story, a series of obstacles and items which has to be navigated as its own challenge. In a sense, each represents a kind of mural, a fresco detailing a narrative of gameplay.
La Mulana recognizes this structure, and presents an internal metaphor for framing it; archaeology. In La Mulana, players take on the role of Professor Lemeza, a Japanese Indiana Jones with the badass blood of a ninja – a pulp hero par excellence. However, even more than Doctor Jones, Lemeza is a practicing archaeologist; while he does his fair share of whipping, leaping, and running from boulders, Lemeza’s task in navigating the ruins of La Mulana is to understand the structures of a lost society, to not only read the messages that they left behind but also interpret and apply them to the rubble around him.
If the screens of these MSX are frescoes, then those which compose the world of La Mulana are densely coded messages from the past. Each screen contains a wealth of information which will not be immediately apparent to the player, revealing its secrets only after hours of gameplay and backtracking. While characters like Samus Aran tend to unlock physical abilities that open up new areas, Prof. Lemeza discovers new forms of interacting with the cultural world around him, new ways of interpreting the signs of this lost civilization. Sure, he will eventually get a double-jump (though later than in any other game of this sort – I applaud the restraint) but what continually shocked me in my time with this game is just how much game material there was left in screens that I thought I had exhausted hours ago. La Mulana is rich and dense.
What is really fascinating about this archeological endeavour, however, is the player is as involved in unearthing the thoughts and beliefs of a lost society as their avatar. Just as Lemeza excavates the ruins, so too does the player attempt to learn and comprehend the inscrutable language of an ancient language: the game design of the 80s. Perhaps the most impressive feat of La Mulana’s design is how it ventriloquizes the sadistic design of those early games: points of interaction are often unclear (especially in the original freeware release), hints are vague and often only make sense in retrospect, and progress-crippling death is often the first and only clue that you have done something wrong. In fact, it is difficult enough to get started that on the North American release of the WiiWare remake, the developers saw fit to release a “Beginner’s Guide” video to help the player through their faltering first steps:
There are those who would argue that because La Mulana is so deliberately obtuse, it is an example of bad design. Certainly, the design choices that La Mulana embraces are archaic and, perhaps, left behind for a reason. However, I suspect that there is a tendency on the part of many critics and developers today to believe that the language of design they use fluently is universal and true, an unassailable rock from which to launch criticisms and write manifestos. La Mulana stands as a testament against this brand of new Formalism, gently reminding its players of the pleasures of the past. Its hints are indeed opaque, but making the connection between the broken poetry of one of the games’ plaques and one of its obstacles affords a shock of discovery and delight that is genuine and rare. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t rely extensively on walkthroughs for much of the game, but nevertheless I had a number of moments when I surprised myself with a gut-hunch that a certain wall was collapsible, or an against-the-grain interpretation of a cryptic message.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, the twin burgeoning sciences of Anthropology and Archaeology provided a basis for questioning Enlightenment values of Universal Truth by demonstrating the viability and coherence of “primitive” cultures. In its own small way, La Mulana manages to do something similar, illustrating an approach outside of the tyranny of “design” that flies in the face of modern consensus. As such, it is a thoroughly remarkable specimen, a genetic experiment using the symbolic DNA of the recent past to forge something at once ancient and new. While the remakeupdates the graphics, sound, and interface of the original MSX- copycat, it retains a sense of history in the very grammar of its design, reconstructing the language of the past archeologically and letting it live again in a way that maybe only this medium is capable of. I heartily encourage you to participate in the dig .
Be careful, though. I hear these ruins are haunted.
Further Reading: Ars Demonica: Shin Megami Tensei and Conversing with Daemons (Medium Difficulty)
