Bit.Trip Flux Review (Wii)

Commander Video has had a long journey. Since his debut in 2009’s Bit.Trip Beat—the first in the six-game Bit.Trip series, which melds a slick retro look with modern design sensibilities—the series’ lo-fi consciousness-cum-protagonist has lived the full, digitized life of a world-weary traveler. The realms that Video explored were pixellated abstractions of videogames’ would-be evolution, and his path an externalization of himself.

With its penchant for using classic arcade as a template (Beat was inspired by Pong, and the games have often borrowed from the mechanics of arcade shooters from Tempest to modern fare), you wouldn’t necessarily expect a series like Bit.Trip to carry such heady conceptualizations. In fact, it’d be easy to pass it off as a simple chiptune-imbued retro revival. But series creator Alex Neuse has said that Bit.Trip is a metaphor for the stages of life, from conception to death and beyond. That “beyond”—the metaphysical hereafter, for a lack of a better term, is where Flux comes in.

Thematically this is apparent from the get-go. Whereas Beat—Bit.Trip’s moment of genesis—adapted Pong into a fast-paced, bullet-hell-esque volley of tonal projectiles the player’s avatar (a paddle) had to deflect to the right side of the screen, Flux is a literal mirror image affected by a lifetime’s experience. Bouncing increasingly complex dot patterns back from the right to left, Flux also incorporates tenets from previous entries, such as avoiding damaging white circles and being “reset” to a previous checkpoint (respective nods to the third and fourth entries in the series, among others). It’s almost as though Video is looking back on his life through the form of his earliest incarnation, from whatever lies beyond. Even the tagline “I am home,” used in the game’s trailer, seems to suggest Flux’s existence is a kind of final, postmortem quest in the last stages before reaching something like a higher state of consciousness.

So Flux is really about ascension. Bit.Trip has always used a scoring system that heightens one’s presence in the game—in design terms this is accomplished by increasingly enriching the depth, color and texture of each game’s infectiously catchy 8-bit AV experience—essentially the better one’s performance, the more profound the game’s aesthetic impact is. This is particularly important with Flux because of its metaphysical trappings, and, despite the difficulty of the challenges that lay ahead, I eventually reached a Zen-like state in negotiating the fast paced gameplay and the game’s greater, undeniable synaesthesia. (Admittedly it took several retries to reach this point.) Still, when Flux clicks, it’s an amazing feeling.

It’s easy to take Flux at face value or view it as just an individual game, but that’s missing the point. From its place in Limbo, Flux is a cumulative of every Bit.Trip that came before it; it’s a deeper and richer experience (with probably the best music in the series) and when it ends, it’s clear that its final white void is the last stop in a wholly—and unexpectedly—reflective experience.

Bit.Trip Flux was developed by Gajiin Games. It is available for the Nintendo Wii via Wiiworks.

Steve Haske is an award-winning gun-for-hire journalist whose work has appeared in GamePro, 1-Up, Mac|Life and Ars Technica, among others. (He can also be found regularly co-hosting the A Jumps B Shoots podcast.) He hopes to one day interview Hideo Kojima and write a book, though preferably not at the same time. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Watch the trailer for Bit.Trip Flux: