Tag: The Power of Paint
Developer: DigiPen Institute Of Technology: Tag Team
Nomination: Student Showcase
Platform: Windows (free download)
Website
Description: Turn the rooftops into your playground with paint that lets you jump, sprint, and stick to walls.

Adam’s Thoughts:
Tag is a fun exercise in game design. It takes something you’d normally assume to be the exclusive province of developers–context sensitivity–and puts it in the hands of the player. Remember how there wasn’t a jump button in Ocarina of Time, and Link would automatically leap whenever he walked off an edge? Well, the edge is the context and jumping is the context sensitive action. Tag is like that, but you can choose where the contexts are placed and what the context sensitive action will be. The developers provide you with the skeleton of a level, but you literally paint contexts on the map that let you run, jump, and wall-crawl your way to the exit.

Gameplay is a bit like a real-time level editor, which makes Tag something akin to Portal, if less fully realized. Tag has much the same stomach-churning level design as that revolutionary title, but sadly it’s over before it really has a chance to start bending your brain into little knots. It’s also worth noting that, while the idea of painting your own context across the world is quite clever, playing the same levels with a run, jump, and wall-crawl button seems like it would be a lot less fun. This makes it difficult to tell if the game is fun because of its clever level design, or because the game is so brief that the novelty never has a chance to wear off. Even if it is the latter though, at least the developers had the good sense to end the game while it was still compelling.

Katie’s Thoughts:
Tag takes the great tastes of parkour and graffiti and puts them together in a great platformer. The game presents you with a grey world, a paint gun, and three colors of paint. Spray green on the ground, an suddenly that patch makes you jump into the air. Red makes you sprint, and blue makes you stick to the surface (thankfully blue comes with an arrow showing you which direction gravity will pull you when you release). In typical 3D platforming style, the game consists of a series of levels, your goal being to navigate to the end position. Tag is different from a lot of platformers in that once you access a color within a level, you can put that color anywhere you want–your super fast running skills aren’t limited to certain textures or beams.

One of the best things about this game is that it lets you change the world to visually reflect how you’re mentally parsing it to do your will. Anyone who has played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for much time at all can look at a two buildings close to each other and see that as a solution to go up. In Tag, you make it your solution by painting the two walls green. A ramp becomes a springboard when you combine a long stretch of red with a patch of green at the end. Landing somewhere unexpected? Shoot a patch of green while you’re in flight, and you’ll bounce back into the air rather than landing with a thud.

That said, none of the levels in Tag are overly difficult, and the game is fairly brief. The game does include a level-editor, though the team doesn’t officially support it’s public use. It also requires a shiny video card, forcing some game reviewers to make observations based purely on the twenty minute complete video walkthrough. It would be great to see either the community or the developers add content to this title.

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Tags:   GDC · IGF · Student Showcase1 Comment

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