Lab 14

## Description

Considering that side-scrolling is a hallmark of platform games, you’d figure
that they’d prompt players to exercise more lateral thinking. It’s all right;
for all the genre’s repetitive and predictable gameplay, _Lab 14_ makes up for
it, prompting players to think outside the box in order to maneuvre the little
bunny-man avatar to each level’s exit.

Something has quite obviously gone wrong in the laboratory, obscure messages
scrawled and splattered on the wall in what is presumably the author’s blood.
And yet demented as the scenario seems, the player must attempt to glean
deeper meaning from the proclamations, as there is an obvious and a not-so-
obvious solution to each screen’s worth of pushable crates, impaling spikes,
and exit doors… and more often than not, the player will find that the
obvious solution just doesn’t work.

The nature of the puzzles shatters the suspension of disbelief; rather than
attempting to immerse the player in the consistent conventions of the (itself
implausibly constrained in two inconceivable dimensions) platformer genre, the
puzzle solutions break the fourth wall and hammer home that the game is being
played by an external player sitting at a computer with peripherals attached,
using a multitasking operating system with a graphical user interface. Really
the platforming is more of an afterthought, though on the surface it appears
to be the whole of the game; ultimately this game challenges the player not to
play it, but to play _with_ it — to interact with the game program in ways
that players are not accustomed to interacting with games.

Lab 14