In my last video journal, I jokingly stated that I would be in “mortal danger of becoming a lazy arse” if I hadn’t written anything by April. I managed to write two morearticles before I fell off the internet for four months. It seems the laziness got me. Make no mistake; I absolutely love producing content for my website. It’s just that laziness is a frequent mistress of overwork, and the first thing to go in my everyday life is my website, followed by exercise.
As I’ve written in the past, the summer offers me some more freedom to work on my website, hence my current presence. Completing this video has been a major feat, largely because I believe it is the first of its kind on the internet. This house originally spurred Player 2 and I to make a walkthrough because we were stuck on the boss for a time. We are ecstatic to share this resource with others and hope it helps others complete the game.
We have two more videos to go before we’re finished. I’m now eying November as our new deadline. This way, I technically meet my previous goal to finish by November, even if it’s no longer the same year.
Holy crap, am I still doing this? Back in October, I said I would finish this series before the end of November. It’s January. The middle of January. I just released theRed Rope review.
Ah geez.
Go read that review and set a timer for April. If I don’t write something by then, I’m in mortal danger. Mortal danger of becoming a lazy arse.
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.
Red Rope: Don’t Fall Behind+ came out on the Switch on November 6th, 2020, almost one year ago. I had hoped to finish the Red Rope walkthrough before that date, and theoretically, I still can if I release a video a week. Ultimately, I had wanted to finish by its anniversary in order to launch a contest, challenging people to beat Player 2 and my score. The video walkthrough would make it easier for people to do that and ideally make it so more people play the game.
I will like still hold the contest, but people may have to settle for an incomplete series. I will plan to finish the walkthrough, and my new deadline will be the end of November. At that time, I will welcome a new addition to my household, and it is very unlikely I will have any brain power to finish a series then.
As such, I have editing to do. I hope to release the Red Rope review by this time next week! We will see if that happens, but that’s how it goes.
Now that we’ve finished the intermediate houses, let’s take a look at the mini-bosses we fought along the way. Each of them dies just like every other monster: you only need to wrap around them. However, they each have defensive and offensive traits which makes eliminating them difficult. We’ll review them in order of difficulty, and I’ll estimate how many lives you may lose. If you’re still learning how to move with your partner, you may die more often.
4. TheAeromancer – Wind:
With bottomless pits on all sides, the Aeromancer’s room can appear daunting, but you’re going to focus on staying in the middle area. The boss will fly about the stage and land on a random pillar of solid ground. It will then blow in one of the cardinal directions, creating a wind which can push you into the bottomless pits. You only need to run against the wind in order to stay in place, and if you’re in the middle of the room, you’ll have ample space to maneuver. Wait until the Aeromancer lands to the direct left or right of you before you pursue it. This makes it so you need to move across only one set of moving platforms in order to kill it.
The Dowser is the only boss who won’t attack you directly. Instead, it summons a massive sand worm to pursue you. Given that the room is mostly made up of sand, you’ll have to evade the sand worm as you chase after the Dowser. The Dowser will teleport around the room at regular intervals or after a few seconds of you chasing it. It is smarter than the average enemy in how it runs away from you, and it will be easier to pincer him if you and your partner are spread apart from each other. When able, move across solid ground to ensure you aren’t too slowed down by the sand. The sand worm may be intimidating, but as long as you keep moving, it won’t be able to kill you. Once you kill the Dowser, the sandworm will die with it. I have not attempted to kill the sand worm, considering it requires a long rope to wrap around it.
You have two Nereids to kill, and they remain invisible unless they’re using their special ability or are running from you. Their special ability allows them to rain ice chunks from above which will kill on contact. Watch for shadows on the ground to avoid these attacks. The battle, itself, will be more about dealing with the four frogs in the room while dodging the ice attacks. Hit the button in the middle to lower the water levels, kill the frogs, and then go after the Nereids. The Nereids can’t use their abilities if you’re chasing after them, and passing your rope over them will freeze them. Once they’re frozen, you only need to wrap around them to kill them.
The Pyromancer will kill you the most easily due to its unpredictability and the instability of the crumbling platforms in the room. This boss will chase after you, pausing every few seconds to chuck two homing fireballs at you. Generally, it will throw two sets of fireballs before it extinguishes its fire armor (although it can also hurl a third set). If you try to kill it beforehand, it will burn through your rope. Once extinguished, you have about 8-10 seconds to rush in and kill it. I recommend you stay on one side of the room, looping around the Pyromancer while dodging its attacks. This way, you have less distance to cover when it does extinguish itself. Just be mindful of the crumbling platforms because they can sink quickly, cutting off your routes or killing you.
