Category: Endless Runner

In his chapter on Habituation in How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost argues that making a game familiar is more important than making it learnable – he specifically claims that games are most easily learnable if we’ve become habituated to their conventions. According to Bogost, successful casual or coin-op games aren’t “easy to learn, hard to master,” but rather culturally familiar and easy to habituate to.

Playing Race the Sun kind of makes me wonder if the developers read Bogost. Well, some of Bogost, at any rate.

Starting a game of Race the Sun most immediately evokes classic racing games, which makes a lot of sense when you consider the title. We take control of a fast-moving vehicle after a rolling start. The camera is placed in the traditional racing position, over and behind the craft (though it can be changed to the front, as in most racing games) and we navigate the gameplay space as though it were a racetrack, rather than moving through a side scrolling level. So we head into a run with the habituated context of a racing game, and we already know what our objectives are – move as quickly as possible through the track and don’t hit anything, because you’ll crash and burn.

A crossover between racing game and endless runner is not exactly a new idea – most endless runners give you something that you need to race against or escape so that you don’t go through the courses too slowly. In Race the Sun it’s, well, the sun, but in Temple Run (an earlier and more well-known endless runner) your character is fleeing from a group of mysterious temple guardians that you foolishly awakened, and in Canabalt your character is fleeing the destruction of his city. Race the Sun, however, borrows the most explicitly from the genre, with regular trick jumps and obstacles forming safe tracks that require careful maneuvering. These combine with item collecting and high scores from endless running games to create an experience that is surprisingly intuitive, for a game about a completely nonsensical scenario.

Bogost seems to think that the best “habitual” games on the market build on previously established ideas. Tetris, he claims, succeeded because it combined several successful elements from old-school domino games – tiling and assembly, to be precise. In this regard, Race the Sun succeeds admirably – the fusion of two popular genres creates a gameplay experience no other game can replicate exactly, and ties into our own cultural knowledge of driving cars. So how come the game hasn’t been successful?

Race the Sun doesn’t carry the name recognition of Tetris or even Temple Run despite occupying similar genre with a unique style of gameplay. Perhaps it’s just that the game was simply published too late. Or perhaps it costs too much – Race the Sun costs under $5 on iphone, but given the trend that mobile games are heading in, any cost may be too much to ask. Temple Run is free, as are some versions of Tetris, and in a world where a free game can deliver a habitable experience as well as Tetris does, it takes something truly extraordinary to succeed as a paid product. Race the Sun might simply not have what it takes to do so.

Race the Sun is at its core an endless runner with a bunch of gimmicks attached. You control a solar-powered craft that must remain in sunlight in order to stay flying. Stay in the shadow for too long, and you’ll run out of solar energy and crash. Run into an obstacle (of which there are many) and you’ll crash. Don’t pick up enough boosters on the track, and the sun will go down, causing you to run out of energy and crash. There are enough ways to crash in the game that you’ll get hit with one of them sooner or later.

I’ve played a number of endless runners, but none of them have managed to hold my interest for very long. Most of them have barely any variation in terms of gameplay – one mode that’s basically a score attack is all you get. And one thing I’m learned about myself as a gamer is that the lure of beating my high score over and over isn’t enough to keep me interested in a game by itself. Race the Sun, however, has stayed on my phone for a longer time than most, and I find myself returning to it fairly regularly. I attribute the fact that it’s kept my interest to a number of factors – chief among them a leveling system and a variety of modes.

Race the Sun has four modes – the classic, baseline mode, a much faster and more lethal apocalypse mode, a slower-paced labyrinth mode that ditches the sundown mechanic and adds an endpoint but requires the player to precisely navigate a maze of tight corridors, and an “endless” sunrise mode, with reduced difficulty and no sundown or end. Only the base mode and sunrise are unlocked at the start – the rest must be unlocked by leveling up. One levels up in Race the Sun by completing in-game challenges. Some challenges (travel 10,000 meters) are fairly straightforward; others (do a barrel roll ten times in one region) are less so. Leveling up also unlocks new attachments and decals for the ship (which change how it controls and looks, respectively).

The leveling system, in my mind, gives Race the Sun what other endless runners I’ve played have been lacking – a system of goals outside of the effort to improve my highscore. Trying to complete one of the challenges would often give me something to aim for after a series of bad runs, and that would convince me to keep playing for longer or for more often than I otherwise would have. The larger variety of game modes and modifications to my ship helped as well. I spent a good amount of time changing the modifications on my ship, either for different challenges or to see which setup would let me go the farthest, and trying to increase my score that way added a lot of time to my sessions. As for the game modes, I found that each one not only offered a different experience, but usually took a different amount of time as well (Apocalypse mode sessions were usually over the most quickly, because it’s easier to crash in that mode). This not only increased the variety of gameplay features, it gave me more settings to play the game in – I could play a reliably shorter mode if I was only taking a short break to play, or I could start a longer game mode if I had a lot of time.

And all that is on top of the main effect of having multiple modes, which is to break up the monotony of endless runs of an endless runner. If that was the plan, it worked well enough to get me hooked – and expanding an audience is good for any game, casual or no.