The Impact Factor

Delightful Dashes: Moving Fast Never Felt Better

Perspectives

Video games are about motion. Across genres, across aesthetics, and across gameplay not many things are shared. Movement is something that’s been at the core of video games since their onset. Video games are about manipulating motion and using it to your advantage.

Just take a look back at some early games. Pong is ostensibly only about motion, as two players manipulate the way a square bounces back and forth across a screen. Galaga and Space Invaders were all about anticipating enemy movement while understanding your own. Tetris is a beautiful series of precise motions, a balance between time management and finesse. Motion is the vehicle by which games bring interactivity to the player.

Each genre engineers motion to suit gameplay demands. For some, it’s simple ups and downs along a straight path. Others it is 360-degree rotation on a 2D plane. As games moved into 3D movement evolved. Motion now wasn’t constrained by up-down-left-right, it could span the gamut of x-y-z axis coordinates. In building towards the level of sophistication required to master 3D movement, a concomitant rethinking of 2D motion occurred. Game developers sought to reimagine what movement along a 2D plane could mean for the player. New titles didn’t just focus on new worlds or narratives; they also focused on revolutionizing the way games handled.

From an early age I have been drawn to action games. I’ve enjoyed a variety of them for a variety of reasons, but one thing that has stayed consistent is how much I enjoy their movement. Quick, skillful combat requires mobility to match. For older action games like Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania, your options were often limited to jumps and good character placement. Over time a wealth of new options were added: like sprinting, blocking, dodging and warping. The mechanic that’s stuck with me the most, however, is dashing.

Dashes are a great solution to a common action game problem—how do you keep motion fluid during (and outside of) combat? A dash can get you from one place to another in a fraction of the time it would take to walk. A dash can also act as a split second, and skill intensive, system to avoid enemy attacks. There is something fundamentally game-y about dashes, too, which endears them to me. Like the double jump before them, dashes are something that comfortably exist outside of reality. Sure, someone could sprint a short distance in the real world but that wouldn’t truly recapitulate an action game dash. Some of my favorite dashes are inhumanly fast. Often, dash systems are titrated to a perfect level in which they both empower the player and add a skill ceiling for those looking to conquer the game’s hardest challenges. To put it succinctly: I love dashes.

This summer I played a trio of action games that got me thinking about dashes. Stories: The Path of Destinies, Furi, and Hyper Light Drifter are totally different games that share one common element—fantastic dash moves. In each game the player is given the tools to zip around the map, making each experience fast and fluid. In wanting to spotlight those dashes here I began to think back to other satisfying dashes in games I’ve played recently. So if you will pardon me the indulgence, let’s look at five awesome feats of speed.

Stories: The Path of Destinies

Though you don’t start the game with it unlocked, Stories: The Path of Destinies does a great job at pushing the player towards unlocking dashes quickly. Dashes are predominantly for facilitating combat. One press of a button quickly closes the gap between player and monster, which is essential for maintaining your combo meter. Dashes can be powered up to travel further, faster, and deal damage to enemies as you collide with them. Outside of combat, dashing towards the next encounter is nice but the three dash in a row limit lessens their impact. Still, what’s not to love about a fox zipping around at lightning speed?

Furi

Furi is a game that took me by complete surprise. Not only does its ‘boss rush only’ design work, it is a game that packs in a lot of complex mechanics. The mechanic I adored, as I am sure you have already guessed, was its dash. Furi’s dashes are fast. Really fast. They teleport the player in a blink of an eye. Dashes are integral to your success in Furi. They are used to dodge enemy attacks, quickly move to exposed boss flanks, and in the game’s bullet hell-like sequences. What I enjoyed the most about the dashes was just how much control Furi gave the player over them. Quickly tapping the dash button moved the player in the desired direction. The button could be held down too, holding your character in place until the button was released. This would increase the distance covered. As I wrote in my review, this added a whole new layer of skill and precision that made Furi great.

Hyper Light Drifter

Hyper Light Drifter is one hell of a game. I promise to review it here soon. The game features yet another great dash. Your scarf-donning silent hero faces a decaying world, sword in hand and ready to move. Similar to the two above games, your dash is so satisfyingly fast. Point in a direction and boom, you’re at your destination. Dashing is unsurprisingly essential, serving the dual purpose of dodging enemy attacks and navigating its open and secret-filled world. Hyper Light Drifter also features a fantastic modification to the dash by allowing players to chain an unlimited number of them together, given you perfectly time your button presses. I still need to complete the 800 chain dash challenge, but man did I love Hyper Light Drifter’s movement.

Transistor

Cut from the same cloth as the above games, my third favorite game of 2014 featured some fantastic dashes. Transistor’s mix of real-time and turn-based combat gave dashing a new layer, making it critical for positioning above all else. What I remember loving was incorporating dashes into combos and then watching them play out in real time.

Bloodborne

If you haven’t, you can read me rave about Bloodborne's dashes in my review. If not, just watch this gif. Perhaps it was its juxtaposition against its much slower Souls forbearers, but moving around in Bloodborne felt supremely satisfying. Bloodborne proved you can add hyper fast mobility to deeply thoughtful Souls combat system and still get a fantastic end result.

Games like the ones I’ve featured above just go to show that dashes are an integral, and fun, part of gaming. Moving fast has never felt better.