Thirty Flights Of Loving gets surprise 9th anniversary update
Adding support for Mac and Linux
I fell mushy, gooey, sweaty in love with Thirty Flights Of Loving from the first time I played it. It's a rapid-fire, magical realistic heist game, which tells its short story using smash cuts, flashbacks, and no dialogue.
It is now nine years old, and so of course it's received a 9th anniversary update. It has been "updated for modern operating systems", with menu, HUD and UI fixes, and Mac and Linux ports. Lovely.
Here's the original release trailer:
The trailer contains the quote, "Tells a better story in 13 minutes than most games do in 13 hours." It's credited to cheeky RPS fanzine PC Gamer, though, so you probably can't trust whoever wrote that. Here's what else they wrote:
We're normally so quick to condemn games that take the language of cinema and cram them in to a medium that's meant to be interactive, but Thirty Flights of Loving uses its borrowed techniques so well that it makes its traditional narrative feel more gamey, not less. It's a first-person game as Scott Pilgrim director Edgar Wright might make them.
It uses montage to tell an incredible amount of story in its short 13 minutes. It uses it to fill in character backstory with stylish, funny jumpcuts. It uses it to tell a linear story while still letting players navigate its levels in ways that they choose, without ramming them in to a dead-end.
I agree with all of that, except the Scott Pilgrim reference, which feels a little dated.
To celebrate the update, TFOL is 50% off from Itch.io or Steam, costing £2/$2.50/€50. But if you own it, you might be excited to know that Brendon Chung, 30 Flights' developer, is now working on a new game, Skin Deep.