There’s an irrational way humans protect themselves from things they don’t want to deal with that I like to call Sergeant Schultz Syndrome. I’m sure anyone with a psychology degree can tell me the proper term for it, but SSS is the belief that something unpleasant doesn’t exist as long as you can’t see it. Like the bumbling character from Hogan’s Heroes, if you see nothing then you can’t be held responsible. The Fourth Wall and its sequel, Four Sided Fantasy, are platform games based on this delusion. There are pits containing lava or spikes, two of the leading causes of death for platforming characters. As long as the lava or spikes are off screen, though, they don’t exist and can’t hurt you.
There’s lava at the bottom of this pit, but it can’t hurt me because it’s not on screen.
If I were a sarcastic person, I would say there is a dearth of indie 2D platformers like The Fourth Wall and Four Sided Fantasy with unique and often-clever gimmicks. The Fourth Wall‘s gimmick is that pressing CTRL locks the screen in place and allows the hero to walk off one side of the screen to emerge on the other side, fall through the bottom of the screen and reappear at the top, or jump through the top of the screen and pop out of bottom. The game is filled with puzzles that are solved by using this gimmick, and I encourage you to download The Fourth Wall for free because because playing it for yourself will give you a much better idea of whether you like it than reading about how much I enjoyed it. Four Sided Fantasy‘s developer, Ludo Land, will build on The Fourth Wall by adding multiplayer, more ways to use screen wrap, and a new art style.
Four Sided Fantasy is scheduled to be released on PC for $10 next year. You can vote for it on its Steam Greenlight page.
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