Red Rope: Don’t Fall Behind+ – Putting Pan’s and Bowie’s Labyrinths to Shame

Some players enjoy games like their hot sauce:  if you’re not in pain and bleeding from some orifice, it’s not good enough.  They want brutally difficult games which mock their skills and steal their lunch money.  With genres like bullet hell shooters, roguelikes, Soulslikes, and precision platformers, the video game industry has embraced these thrill-seekers and offered arenas to earn bragging rights.  Many of these games, however, lack one of the greatest challenges a player can encounter:  basic communication and teamwork skills, the ghost pepper of video games.    

Red Rope: Don’t Fall Behind+ provides the punishing difficulty in a couch-cooperative form.  You and your gaming partner must become masters of patience and solidarity to succeed, and even then, you’ll die, again and again.  Red Rope’s developers, Yonder, have crafted a maze of ruthless monsters and gruesome death traps, all in the effort to destroy relationships and spirits in equal measure.  Melodrama aside, this game presents a spicy test to hardcore gamers, and those willing to tackle the labyrinth will discover a smartly-designed game in which hard-fought success is intoxicating.

What is it?

You and your partner (or just you, with a character assigned to each control stick) find yourselves in a labyrinth, bound by the titular red rope. Apart from a few NPCs, everything wants to kill you, from ghosts to minotaurs to self-immolating witches. You must navigate at least six of the 12 houses in order to access and defeat the main baddie at the center of the labyrinth, thus earning your freedom.

You will dispatch most enemies by either passing your rope over them or encircling them with it. The controls are simple enough, with X allowing you to pirouette and shorten your rope while ZL slows you to a walk. Otherwise, you simply move, with the challenge being how you travel in-sync with your partner. Move in opposite directions or after different targets, and you’ll tug each other and go nowhere. Eliminating an enemy will lengthen your rope and provide more freedom to move, but this precious elbow room will disappear each time you die.

And die you will. A single touch from a monster will kill you. Falling down a pit or into spikes will do that as well. If something burns or severs your rope, the two of you will disintegrate, just like babies when the umbilical cord is cut too early. You’ll die so often the game gives you 100 lives to start. Lose them all, and you have to start from the beginning (or reload from a checkpoint, but that sounds much less dire). You can regain lives a few different ways, offering a semblance of hope as the ticker ever decreases.

Despite the number of enemies you’ll fight, Red Rope plays more like a puzzle game than a dungeon crawler. Each house is separated into several single-screen rooms which you cannot leave until all enemies are cleared. Later houses will throw in more obstacle courses and button-based puzzles which often prove just as deadly as the beasties. Careful planning—in addition to quick reflexes and teamwork—will help you figure out how to take out the monsters with the fewest deaths possible. These rooms need not be completed in one go either.  Most enemies won’t respawn after you kill them, allowing you to slowly chip away at the numbers over the course of several lives.

What’s good?

• Red Rope’s simple presentation belies the intentional complexity of the labyrinth. The first room of each house acts as a tutorial, following the Miyamoto school of thought where the level design gently nudges you toward how you should play. Subsequent rooms each add a variation to the formula, and you’ll adjust as you die. By the final few rooms of a house, you’ll know how to anticipate and conquer the house’s obstacles.
• Many players will consider Red Rope’s difficulty as a plus.  For those who find the challenge too arduous, the game implements several mechanics to promote your success. Easy-to-kill skeletons and neutral shadow people offer extra lives, and you can create checkpoints to reload if you have a particular disastrous run. As noted earlier, you only need to clear half of the 12 houses, so you can cherry-pick the easier ones (Spring, Winter, Earth, Water, Famine, War). The game saves at every room as well, allowing you to take breaks and scream into a pillow whenever needed.
• Every cleared room feels like triumph, similar to overcoming a boss in Dark Souls or making any progress in Getting Over It. When you and your partner finally move in-sync, it’s like you’ve forged your soulmate through hellfire and cursing. In the past, Yonder would add you as a character if you bested the labyrinth, and now, they still encourage you to email them so they can congratulate you. At the very least, winning means you join an exclusive leaderboard of only four teams/individuals, as of the time of this writing.

What’s bad?

• Certain mechanics push past masochistic pleasure and into torturous annoyance. The House of Wind showcases moving platforms above bottomless pits which demand you to move cautiously and slowly lest you fall to your death and have to restart the tedium again. The House of Pestilence’s central gimmick is a floor tile which reverses your movement, which is finicky in out of itself but gets worse when you transition between normal floor tiles and the reversed floor tiles. Because a house is often defined by one theme, if you don’t like that theme, it can be a slog to clear that section.
• Each house typically has one or two dud rooms, usually caused by two mechanics.  One, some enemies amble about randomly in their room, leaving you to wait until they offer a window for you to strike.  Two, button-based puzzles reset when you die—unlike the enemies—resulting in unnecessary repetition. The boss for the House of Fate struggles with both of these issues, making an otherwise brilliant encounter a test of patience and luck.
• The presentation is lackluster. Three minimalistic songs will accompany you during the majority of your journey through the houses, looping endlessly as you die and try again. Although pleasant for the most part, the pixel art lacks any distinctive flair. As covered in this document, Yonder injected a good deal of symbolism in their art design, but apart from the central theme of duality, all of the literary references and hidden meanings amount a to smorgasbord of disjointed ideas rather than a defining message. Bugs are present as well, most notably in the battle with the House of Pestilence’s boss.

What’s the verdict?

Red Rope:  Don’t Fall Behind+ has all the trappings of a cult classic except for the cult following.   Not everyone will have a gaming partner who likes aggressively difficult couch co-op indie games, and I imagine fewer still would want to venture into the labyrinth alone.  Certain players do meet these criteria, even if they’re all playing Don’t Starve Together instead.  For that crew, Red Rope earns a hearty recognition with its intelligent level design and strong core concept.  If Red Rope remains in obscurity, it more than earns its distinction as the best hidden gem on the Switch.

Arbitrary Statistics:

• Score:  8
• Time Played:  Over 30 hours
• Number of Players:  1-2
• Games Like It on Switch:  Phogs!, Unravel Two

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