Zineth
Arcane Kids - PC - 2012
Zineth was an experimental student game that was originally supposed to be a proof of concept but instead turned into what it is now, which is maybe the length of a traditional game demo and one of my top n games of the 2010s. people compare it to Jet Set Radio because it’s cel shaded and has wallriding and rollerskates, but it doesn't have as much tricks or graffiti. it does have incredible high speeds, a bunch of quests and secrets, a brilliant rewind feature and the best "pause" menu of all time.
this game takes place in a wasteland where society has collapsed after everyone got absorbed with a mobile game, and now they all get their information about everything from zines. you play as a zine delivery guy and the "main line" missions involve you getting zines to folks around the city. the quests are technically the main gameplay but they take a back seat to going fast and looking around at the neon post-apocalypse while listening to the high-speed experimental soundtrack. there's only 13 missions, most of which are time trials on little courses within the open world. the only "hard" one is the last one, get to the moon, which can be done the intended way by beating a bird at Zineth's version of Pokemon Go. (this game has a version of Pokemon Go, by the way, with a bit more depth to its combat. a lot more, actually, normal Pokemon Go combat is boring. I like this game's version of it better.) there are also dozens of people to beat at that game, cash so you can upgrade your monsters, and lots of secret zine pages to find.
but the main focus is really speed. there's a nice big speedometer up in the corner to tell you how fast you're going. you can wallride and grind rails to build speed and you gain it a lot faster than you lose it, so it's very possible to get your speed to the hundreds, at least until you crash into a wall and lose it all instantly. it’s also easy to whiff a jump when you’re moving that fast. the devs knew this wasn't fun so they added an awesome rewind feature that lets you go to whatever point you want from the last several seconds and continue from there with all your speed! the cityscapes of Zineth are fun to explore at any reasonable velocity because in most areas you can either start gaining speed or continue to build it with the help of rewind.
I never expected myself to be able to write an entire paragraph about a pause menu in a video game of all things but this one is seriously remarkable, I promise. instead of covering the screen like many do, regardless of whether they actually stop the motion of the game, Zineth's menu is relegated to a phone on the side of the screen that leaves most of your view open. its menus get the entire right stick instead of giving any kind of camera control — which is alright because there aren't any precision jumps that you'd want to turn the camera for — so you always have full access to it even while moving. that's what makes this menu so great, how you can use every part of it while playing the actual game. most menus in it are radial, which makes them much faster and more elegant than scrolling through options. just like in real life, it's kinda hard to go hundreds of miles per hour while looking at your phone without crashing, so if you want the game to stop moving, you can just use the rewind feature. also, it has Twitter! I don't know how to use it, and I don't think you can anymore, but Zineth's phone has real actual Twitter. (Team Reptile's upcoming Bomb Rush Cyberfunk seems to like the phone UI too!)
the developers Arcane Kids have been silent for years now, but they had an excellent run. maybe I'll write about their other games at some point. Zineth is free on PC — well, it was, but all official downloads are now dead, so here's a link to it at archive.org instead. this game is way, way better with a controller, so use one of those if you have it, but if not it's still worth playing on keyboard. definitely try it out.
(P.S. for those wishing to use online multiplayer, the IP you enter when you want to start a server is your EXTERNAL IP, not your internal like all the other games. and you have to port forward, just like if you’re starting a Minecraft server.)
