One of the finest publishers, curators even, of mobile games has always been [adult swim]. Every game they bring to mobile through their partnerships is either funny, creative, or at least different or interesting in some way. Try Harder(Free) from Glitchnap falls violently and repeatedly in the latter camp. It’s an endless runner, which isn’t exactly a rarity on the App Store, but it’s almost an experimental game. While it isn’t amazing and it isn’t for everyone, it’s definitely interesting, and worth playing for the unique experience. If you enjoy difficult games, this might be your jam.
As the title implies, you’ll die, and die, and die again, but you’ll just have to try harder each time you respawn. Well…. Not respawn. You play as an endless parade of weird identical bird people literally jammed wall to wall and floor to ceiling in the starting shack, all wearing a plank of wood on their back. This is because death is very permanent, and consistent. Every time you die, whether by spike or sea, your corpse will stay behind, acting as a platform or buffer. You can even endlessly run into walls to create staircases if you get lazy or curious. It’s pretty neat.
As you run through the pastel colored, largely quadrilateral landscape, you’ll come across pick-up bubbles containing glide, double jump, and invincibility spiked death ball transformation power-ups. Though you’re not as invincible as you think, as you can still be killed by pits and head on wall collisions. It would have been cool if you climb-rolled up over walls and corners being so spiky and all. You can have up to three at once, trailing behind, you, and the most recently picked up is first to be used. The gameplay is fast paced and just a little bit finicky in the hit detection department. You’ll come across several deaths that feel a bit off, but it’s not so hard to adapt and minimize these instances.
There are two goals to aspire to in this game. Distance, and score. Here’s where we have another twist. You mainly only gain new score when you’re traveling new distance. Also from picking up gold chests and destroying your old corpses with the rolling death ball. The farthest distance you reach before you die leaves a checkpoint, and when you pass that checkpoint you’ll continue gaining big points. Every time you die, however, you lose points. So here’s the tradeoff. If you want to gain distance, there’s no issue in dying and dying and literally walking across your fallen comrades to new heights. But if you want score, you’ll probably have to reset the map at some point.
And it’s worth it to do so. The layout changes a bit each time, but generally follow the same patterns. You’ll notice when you finally break into the big distances of 1,000 meters plus, that the maps are randomly generated, but use the same set-pieces over and over. Exact placement of spikes and such can vary, but it becomes a bit predictable. Granted, that’s after a few hours of playing, banging your head against the great brick wall of progress over and over again, so you’ll still get plenty of fun out of the game. You don’t have to restart from the beginning after every run either. After a few minutes, you’ll get a few revives. You can use one revive every run until they run out. You’ll have to watch an advertisement to use a revive, unless you pay for the only IAP in the game to remove ads for three dollars.
I will say this. It takes a lot of time for the game to click with you. Or at least, it did for me and many others in our forums . With the scoring, it’s not like most games, and it can feel pointless or directionless at times. This is kind of true. After so much time playing, without anything really changing or any unlocks or what have you, it gets hard to remain excited or invested in the game. But resetting the map a lot and going for high score after high score, or getting creative with deaths/bodies makes for some novelty and engagement.
The art style is nice and minimalistic, but you will get tired of the music and the various voices telling you to ‘try harder’ every single respawn. Sometimes you’ll read a funny line on the death/respawn screens, but otherwise the humor is more in the aesthetics and tone. I didn’t really like this game at first. It just was not hooking me. But I kept playing, reset the map a few times, and I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I was completely hooked for a few days. It’s completely free, so go nuts. If you want, you can also play the flash version on the [adult swim] site. Happy trying!
