Turner, the game’s protagonist, can use all four limbs to race across the game’s expansive zones, which means he has to get on all fours before taking off.

While it was initially off putting that I needed to crouch before being able to run, such an action has a certain logic to it. The game seems to expect the baggage that players might bring and offers several reminders that high jumps are executed by crouching down and then springing up, while a running sprint yields a long, low altitude bound. A game about rabbits naturally features a fair amount of jumping, but these leaps tend to work differently than in a platformer like Mario. With minimal expectations, I was able to avoid hasty comparisons. This blank slate approach probably worked in Lugaru’s favor.

I had to learn about a game based on its internal structures, rather than testing it against preconceived opinions. I had no such basis for comparison for Lugaru, so playing it evoked a strange sensation akin to playing Pac-man for the first time. Today, I usually can make fairly accurate predictions about games that I haven’t played based on my knowledge of the genres in which they exist. My knowledge of genres and conventions was nonexistent, so I had to classify those games after experiencing them. I couldn’t prepare myself for the absurdity of Donkey Kong or the weird landscape of Q*bert because I had no sense of context.

Because I knew nothing of the game’s characters, setting, or rules, the experience felt similar to trying to grasp some of the earliest games that I played. Taking control of a bipedal warrior bunny actually was a new experience. As I spun the fast moving camera around my anthropomorphic rabbit avatar, the long familiar third dimension suddenly felt fresh. Games like World of Goo, Braid, Limbo, and a host of excellent browser-based games that had dominated the headlines had molded my expectations of the world that I’d be entering. I realized that I had developed a mental image of what an “indie” game looked like: two-dimensional and artistically stylized. I entered Lugaru‘s tutorial and was immediately taken aback by what I saw: polygons. This lack of knowledge drastically affected my response to every portion of Lugaru HD and prompted me to reexamine my approach to video game analysis as well as the pitfalls of knowing too much about a game before playing it. Aside from its title and its menu icon, I knew nothing about the game. For no reason in particular, I installed Lugaru HD and proceeded to experience something I hadn’t felt since I played my first video game on my Dad’s early-1980s Zenith computer: total ignorance. I had played (and loved) World of Goo but had never even seen screenshots of the the rest of the collection.Ģ011 rolled around, and I realized that I still hadn’t played any of the games for which I so righteously paid. I wasn’t just hoarding games and adding to my ever-expanding backlog I was making a statement by supporting independent developers! I happily bought a collection of games I knew very little about. It was the perfect opportunity to justify the purchase of more games. Back in 2009, I joined 138,813 other people in hopping on the Humble Indie Bundle bandwagon.

Lugaru full game