NO THING is about the hardest runner game I’ve ever played. And I haven’t played very many.

You play in the first person, and the only two keys you need are A and D or the left and right arrow keys. You have to avoid hurtling off defined platforms into the murky abyss below.

It requires such fast reflexes that anyone looking at you tensed up at your computer keyboard will think that it is a matter of genuine life or death. My hands got sweaty, my eyes went blurry – NO THING demands perfection from you, and sometimes I don’t think NO THING actually deserves perfection.

NO THING is a game with beautiful art, but it’s hard to look at for too long before it starts hurting your eyes. What makes NO THING more than just a simple curiosity for people who want to test their reflexes is the story.

The story is told by a robotic commentator, who often repeats lines seemingly at random, but the story has reason to it. Clever reason, too. There’s a reason the game is constructed the way it is, why it looks so strange. But that doesn’t become clear until a bit later in the game, after you’ve made it through several nail-bitingly tough levels. One level is so hard I’m not sure I’d actually be able to replicate what I did to pass it. I am pretty sure it required more than 100 attempts. Probably somewhere in the 200s from gut feeling.

The question then is whether or not a game like NO THING, which is so brutally difficult, is actually worth playing for the story. When does a person say “no, actually, enough is enough”, and just stop playing? The story isn’t as good as classics like Silent Hill or Pathologic, nor does it have any characters as likeable as Elena Fisher or Nathan Drake from the Uncharted games. In fact, it doesn’t even really have characters at all. It’s an experiment in storytelling, I suppose. How far do you go through obstinate, tough mechanics for a poetic story that explains why the gameplay is so hard, or even the context of why you are running like this through repetitive pathways?

I went all the way, but I couldn’t even tell you exactly why. If you’re looking for horror, it’s not particularly scary in any meaningful way, unless the idea of a drugged out dystopia particularly frightens you. I was hoping that the game would start to fray at the seams a little, or change up the gameplay a bit more. It seemed to me like a horror game from the loo of it, but it wasn’t really anywhere close to one. I was looking for more, but there wasn’t really that much more to it. Levels dipped and raised in quality and difficulty, and the story delivered in some levels didn’t feel especially consequential. Or maybe that’s just because I was focusing way too hard on the gameplay, and missing chunks of the narration. It’s very, very experimental. I liked it, but that’s only because I’m fairly willing to forgive a game for stuff if it’s actively trying something new.

A tough one to recommend to a general audience – or so it seems. But the feeling of sheer triumph from beating even just one of the levels is such a gratifying sensation that, even if stories in games don’t interest you, even if experiments like this bore you, that maybe, just maybe, the little part of your brain that likes to test reflexes will be enough.
All I can say is, good luck.

You can get it on Steam, the app store, Google Play, or the Nintendo Switch! (I played the Steam version, can’t vouch for any of the others)