Deadly Oranges: A Quick Note on Thirty Flights of Loving

The new Errant Signal video by Chris Franklin is all about Blendo Games, and specifically the evolution of Blendo’s first-person stuff. This includes Thirty Flights of Loving. (I highly recommend that you watch the Errant Signal video, but I think you should play the game first, if you haven’t.)

Whenever Thirty Flights gets brought up, I get excited. I love that game, so I just like to take any excuse I get to celebrate it. Once in a while I go back and play it for the quick, exhilarating jolt of narrative audacity that it is, a little knife through the heart. 

One of my favorite things I wrote for GameSpot was this piece on Thirty Flights. I just loved getting the chance to champion what I felt was an important game. That was less than three years ago, but back then, I think it’s fair to say that there was maybe a sense that a game like this couldn’t really be reviewed by a site like ours, because it was so clearly not interested in doing the things that our reviews usually evaluated games based on. I guess I feel like this is one sense in which things have started to improve in the past few years: I think today there wouldn’t be nearly as much concern about how to approach a game like this from a review perspective.

Anyway, here’s a bit of what I had to say about the game back then:

Thirty Flights of Loving never makes its connections explicit, as it jumps from the airfield to other places and times, and then back again. It’s on you to put the pieces together. But doing so is a pleasure, because there are moments of beauty that catch you off guard, and because the momentum of the story is so propulsive, driving you ever onward to its inevitable conclusion. The effect, ultimately, is like that of being at a moment of tremendous gravity and consequence in one’s life, while memories of choices made in the past that led you to this moment intrude on the present.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just linger forever in that one perfect moment, that moment when you held love in your arms and freedom seemed to stretch before you endlessly?
Alas, time waits for no one.
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An orange can be deadly, if you mean it.