Think of the old Pokemon games, foolishly entering a cave without the HM Flash and deciding, “That’s fine, I’ll just keep going,” only to get lost and have your precious Charmeleon knocked out by an endless horde of Zubats. Now combine that with those Super Mario Maker levels that look like KGB studies on how much stress a human can handle before their mind breaks. Welcome to GLO. GLO is a sadistically difficult platforming game that released on Steam a few years ago and just last month on Switch, PS4 and PS5.
At its core GLO is a simple game about a cube finding its way through increasingly difficult platforming levels. In the dark. The primary mechanic to this game is that everything is shrouded in darkness except for a little bubble of neon light surrounding your cube and the exit, which shines like a beacon in the distance. You guide your little cube around the blocky environments, all the while making precise wall-jumps and tackling enemies while heading for the door. Sometimes it works: shooting the light gun tool down a hallway in order to see what may be lurking is sort of fun. As is the feeling of perfectly lining up a difficult jump to a ledge just out of sight. The controls are kept a bit loose, making it feel as if even the slightest tap in the wrong direction will lead to doom. It isn’t as much fun when you try jumping to a platform and one of the games Goombas, which the artstyle renders as a rectangle half the height of the protagonist’s cube, has decided that this is the moment it will be on the edge of aforementioned platform. Sending you right back to the start of the horseshit difficult level. That’s just what this game is though. Which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. Plenty of people enjoy torturing themselves. At any time in a bondage dungeon the gimp could just stand up to the whip brandishing mistress and say, “Nah, I’m good thanks,” before booking it the hell out of there. Instead the masochist accepts the silly rules and plays along with the dominatrix’s game. The pleasure is the pain. And the silly rule in this game is that you can’t see any of the level you’re about to do.
GLO isn’t the best game in the ultra-hard platforming genre, I already mentioned the darker corners of Super Mario Maker and then there are the genre classics like The N Game/ N/ N+/ N++, or whatever it’s called now, but this game is less expensive and has some charm of its own.
Sure, supermarket-brand Goombas exploring the stage at their own pace is annoying, but to be fair to the designer, it’s predictable. Each stage has a timing to it, and it always feels like the true way to play the game is to memorize each and every stage, know the timings of when each obstacle will appear and almost go through it with a blindfold.
Overall for a game that can be played on the subway it has that simple pick-up and play magic combined with the self-torture that some of us so desperately crave.
If you’re one of those twisted souls go ahead and pick it up on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, or PC and cancel your next appointment with your dom.
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