Developed/Published by: Blendo Games
Released: 20/08/2012
Completed: 18/09/2025
Completion: Finished it.

Thirty Flights Of Loving has loomed large in my mind for, uh, thirteen years, because I added it to my Steam wishlist and then promptly just never picked it up. An absolutely insane situation considering the game, at fifteen minutes long, is actually shorter than Gravity Bone which preceded it. I mean I waited nearly a year per minute. Well, I’ve played it now.

Thirty Flights Of Loving, compared to Gravity Bone, is a bit more of a challenge. If Gravity Bone took what you expected about a first person game and then twisted it, Thirty Flights of Loving doesn’t even give you the grace of letting you settle in before twisting. I mean, it’s pre-twisted is what I’m saying. You open the bag that says “bagel” on it and there’s a goddamned pretzel in there.

(I suppose in this metaphor, with Gravity Bone you’d start eating a bagel and then it would suddenly twist in front of your eyes into a pretzel? Creepy. I don’t like this metaphor any more!!!)

Thirty Flights Of Loving is ultimately an exploration of the idea: can you do cinematic cuts in a video game? Telling, vaguely and non-linearly, the story of doomed love and a heist gone bad, the game cuts intentionally and cleverly to remove the thing you just don’t remove from video games–the “dead space” between incident. It’s shocking, actually, to head down a corridor and suddenly find yourself, well, in a new room, because the trip down the corridor adds nothing narratively.

This is a decision that few games I know of have made outside of–of course–their cut-scenes, and I think it raises really interesting questions about the value of what we do in games. I’ve written at crushing length about the difficult path games try to walk–narrative, but play–and I suppose the disappointing thing about Thirty Flights Of Loving is that it has interaction but no “play”, where I feel like the theory–we could have cinematic cuts in games–can only be proven by giving me actual play and “cutting” when I’m not doing anything that’s actively in aid of that. After the firefight, cut to the exterior, don’t make the player navigate there–but never take the control away from the player. Just cut.

I think for many, the potential flaw here is obvious–it’s discombobulating. I mentioned above that the cuts are shocking, which in many ways is surprising, because cuts in cinema are, famously, not shocking (proven scientifically.) Is is simply that “flow”, that hugely important state to the interactive art is broken by a cut? 

Or does Thirty Flights Of Loving’s use of only scene cuts–keeping action continuous elsewhere–create more discontinuity when paired with its mysterious narrative? Could a game with even heavier use of cuts–cuts within scenes and cuts between scenes–work better? What would that even look like?

I’m not sure, but it’ll probably take a game longer than fifteen minutes to work it out. Thirty Flights Of Loving does a lot with its time, managing some moments of beauty and ending with a recognisable longing. I might go so far as to say a saudade. Maybe Thirty Flights Of Loving doesn’t answer any questions, but the ones it leaves you with are worth thinking about.

Will I ever play it again? I’ll wait another thirteen years and see how I feel.

Final Thought: I’d be remiss not to point out something else cinematic about Thirty Flights Of Loving that really stands out–the superb score by Chris Remo. It’s a huge factor in the game’s feel.

Developed/Published by: Blendo Games
Released: 03/25/2010
Completed: 13/07/2025
Completion: Survived an entire run with… caveats.

Well, I didn’t get the Xbox out as I said I wouldn’t in my Gravity Bone essay, but I did decide to play some Flotilla on PC. This worked out in my favour because I almost immediately remembered why I gave up on Flotilla the first time–that I don’t have a fucking clue how to move ships in 3D space–and was then able to abuse a save mod to be able to literally not die in my first or second battle every time. I mean I literally died in the tutorial on my first run!

Flotilla is an interesting one, because it’s a good example of a “nearly there”, a work that makes you think of a huge hit that came later that just nails what it was trying to do. In this case, it’s FTL, which takes the metagame (travelling between nodes in space, experiencing events or battles) but ties it to a much more understandable battle system more inspired by board games like Space Alert and a clear drive towards a conclusion.

In some respects, it’s a shame that Flotilla wasn’t a success, because arguably FTL misses some of the spirit of Flotilla, but in others, it makes total sense. As I said above, the battle system is extremely taxing. Not only does it require the player have a really strong understanding on how to position things in 3D space on a 2D screen, you also have to be able to predict how multiple opponents will themselves move in 3D space, because turns happen simultaneously. And ships are only really vulnerable from above or below, so it’s not even a matter of just trying to make a beeline to enemies and wipe them out–you have to track how they’re oriented and consistently flank them to do any damage.

In my case, once I had worked out how to move my ships (you do x/y movement first, then z, which while not intuitive, does make sense if you can stand to constantly reposition the camera to see what you’re actually doing) I quickly learned I have no knack for prediction whatsoever. Send a ship to flank? It’d just end up miles away from the ship I intended because that ship would move in a way I didn’t expect–or somehow it would end up exposing its belly while flying directly at it. Again: I died on the tutorial.

The mistake Flotilla makes is that it’s designed to be a short, replayable experience–each run is supposed to be, like, a half an hour, as you’re cast as a starship captain with seven months to live–but thinks that makes it ok that you’ll die in the first couple of nodes tens of times because the game is hard. It doesn’t! You just feel like you’re not getting it. You never get to settle in, see the campaign play out a little.

It would be unfair to call the game complicated–the rules are very simple once you understand them. It’s just that the combination of rules, interface and simultaneous movement makes the whole thing deeply frustrating, and it stops you enjoying the metagame, which hints to everything that FTL would do. You get to experience cute events which can pay off in future events or battles, ships “level up”, and you can get useful upgrades for them. You can even expand your fleet with new and bigger ships. 

You’ll probably face those bigger ships before you get any yourself though–nothing quite as demoralising as getting further than you ever have and immediately having your ships carved into pieces by a “beam ship” that the tactics now require you keep your distance from (how!!!)

One thing I do like–perhaps counter-intuitively–is that the game doesn’t have a final boss or conclusion that you’re working towards as in FTL. In FTL and other games of this sort–your Cobalt Cores, for example–you have to always be building towards that final battle. If luck doesn’t grant you the build you need or are working towards–your run is pointless. Here the end is: you die, either in battle or from your terminal illness. There is an “endless” mode (added after release) but I like that the idea of the game was just “have fun in space until you die!”

The problem is that I don’t find the battle system fun at all, so I can’t! In the end I just used save backups to play a full run, which of course, was meaningless. But it was nice to have this deadly, upgraded fleet after rescuing some cats and ripping off some hitchhikers before I shuffled off this mortal coil. Felt like I’d done something with my life.

It’s that stuff that makes Flotilla so charming, and kind of what kept me battering my head against it so pointlessly. It’s got style. Panache. And I think if you like this type of taxing, 3D space battler, well, this is a step out of the norm and all the better for it. But it’s not for me.

Will I ever play it again? Absolutely never, no. There’s a sequel, Flotilla 2 for VR, and  feel like moving ships around literally in 3D space might make it more playable. However…

Final Thought: Flotilla 2 cuts the campaign out completely! Even if I was to get fancy and pick up a Steam Frame or something being unable to rescue cats drops what feels like the unique selling point of the game (for me.) But at the same time, really the battle system is the distinguishing factor, and I don’t actually like it! So I suppose if I want to play a node-based event/battle roguelike-like with funny events, there’s like… six hundred I haven’t played. I can just play one of those.

Developed/Published by: Blendo Games
Released: 28/08/08
Completed: 05/07/25
Completion: Completed it.

Blendo Games’ Skin Deep was released this year, and as is often the case, a new game makes me go “oh yeah, I haven’t really played much or anything by that developer” and I therefore feel like I have to start from the beginning. In this case, I’d previously played this and Blendo Games’ Flotilla (which I believe I still have on Xbox Live Indie Games?) but Gravity Bone only takes twenty minutes so I thought I’d run through it again (I don’t think I’m going to get the Xbox out for Flotilla, though it’s also still on Steam.)

Anyway, Gravity Bone is still well worth running through in 2025 (you can too if you like, and then come back.) It worked fairly well for something made in 2008 even if it did crash consistently if I went into the menu and I was never able to get the graphics looking right in full screen (I wouldn’t even bother trying to get it working on a Steam Deck. But, again, it’s twenty minutes long.)

What strikes me about Gravity Bone now is actually similar to what Kieron Gillen said about it way back in 2009–the confidence it has. A tiny spy thriller with blocky characters, designed with intentionality. The janky nature of playing it now could be detrimental, but the work shines through–like pulling up a scratchy digital transfer of an old short movie that was never matched.

To get into spoiler territory (again, for a game that’s twenty minutes long) I love that the game breaks the “rule of three”. You complete your first easy mission. Your second mission is a little more complex, featuring tools to use and in a very “2000s FPS” way, some tricky jumping. And then, before you can move on… you get shot.

Suddenly everything you expect from a game is broken. You can’t just follow what you’re being told to do. You’ve got to get up and chase your assailant, surely you’ll catch them. But then… you die.

But as you die, you “remember” everything that brought you there. Suddenly you are no longer just  in control of an avatar doing as you were told–you understand you were playing a person, as you see their life flash before their eyes. It’s… surprising. And then? Truly? It’s actually quite moving.

You are taken from a pure video game experience to an emotional one, something that few games have managed in experiences that number in the tens of hours. I don’t want to oversell it too much, but while they say brevity is the soul of wit, Gravity Bone has wit and soul in its brief run time. 

Will I ever play it again? If you haven’t heard, it’s only twenty minutes. But even at that…

Final Thought: Spoilers: in the time between starting to write this article and finishing it I did in fact decide I just had to play Flotilla after all. What am I like.