A few weeks back, at a loss for anything to play, I opened up GOG Galaxy and scrolled to the top of the 1188 item list, installed the first game on the list, and played it blind, without trying to find out anything about it. After I finished that game, 10 Second Ninja, I took the next game, 60 Parsecs, for a spin. I’ve since decided to turn it into an exercise for as long as my interest holds: I’ll work my way down the list, trying every game with less than an hour of playtime on it, and spend at least an hour giving it a fair shot, after which I can continue playing or move on down the list, as I like.

This is the place I’ll talk about it, for as long as the exercise lasts.

This time I’m rambling about:

Aaero (The Mad Gentlemen, 2017)

Aaero is the game that has best evoked for me the feeling of playing music in a band. Given that it’s a game about a ship hurtling through some kind of context-free post-apocalypse, chasing a magic ribbon, fighting giant spiders, and keeping pace with some pulsing EDM, this has been surprising to me. For one thing, we never played EDM in high school band.

But there it is! I remember having a saxophone solo in a music class performance in tenth or eleventh grade (I think I was covering a flute solo in Cimarron Overture, but don’t quote me on that), that I was terrified of doing. We would be performing for a group of indifferent primary schoolers, so obviously it was very important that I get it right. And I do distinctly remember the feeling of approaching the solo, note by note, beat by beat, until suddenly it was time to play and…

Once I’d got the first note off, the rest was pretty easy. It was only the first note that was hard; after that I’d committed and I had to go through with it. I remember the fear just slipping away and being replaced by a feeling like cresting a wave, like I was the front-line of some grand charge, and I was pulling it, and it was pushing me, and since I was already doing that, I might as well keep doing it. Stopping didn’t actually feel like a problem once I’d begun.

Aaero – even if only fleetingly – evoked that sensation for me, twenty (five) years later. And it managed to do this moreso than games seeking to more ‘purely’ evoke the experience of playing an instrument – remember when everyone had a plastic orchestra in their living rooms? – by translating that cresting feeling into actual forward propulsion. Aaero is very, very good at generating a sense of incredible, uncontrollable speed, where the music is the hare and your little ship is the fox. There are moments playing Aaero when I would hit the ribbon and stay there that produced a feeling of euphoria, the sense that rather than playing through the level I’d merged with the level. Then I’d hit a wall and die. But just for that second…

Part of that is probably that I’m not very good with my hands. I was born with a mild learning disability: my fine motor control is deficient compared to what’s considered normal. It’s a very, very minor handicap not a factor in my day-to-day life except for the fact that, even at thirty eight, my handwriting is hilariously, humiliatingly juvenile. I do sometimes feel as if my brain is sending messages to my hands that it’s receiving like a JPG on dialup, especially when I’m tired or stressed, but it doesn’t really affect my life at all. I work around it on the rare occasions I need to: I never managed to learn how to hold a pen or pencil in my subordinate hand, so I make students submit online.

I like anything that tricks me into thinking that I have a surgeon’s hands – two cool, precise instruments, executing fine adjustments, at speed, improvising and responding smoothly, quickly, and flawlessly to changing circumstances. Fighting games are good for this too – I’m not good at them by any means and get smeared whenever I go online, but when I can train my fingers to execute even a decently long combo with a reasonably regular degree of success, even if I only ever use that combo to punch a training dummy, it fills me with a sense of accomplishment quite unlike anything else in gaming. Look at the button presses! All in a row! Like they were on purpose! Hitting the ribbon in Aaero and staying there, moving with the melody while shooting down enemies robots (aliens?) produced a similar feeling or pride.

This all probably makes playing Aaero sound like a kind of transcendent game, when it is in fact merely a very good one, one of those oddball genre mashups that makes you wonder why it took people so long to put them together. And I would hardly say I mastered it, or ever planned to. I hit my skill ceiling pretty fast, after reaching sixty stars on Normal, clearing all the levels, and defeating the game’s three bosses, and that was plenty for me. I never like the feeling of starting over from scratch in rhythm games when you more from a lower difficulty level to a higher one. And unlike Rock Band, for example, Aaero is not an inherently social experience, so there’s nothing pushing me to revisit content I’ve already cleared. I also just don’t really feel like putting in the work necessary to master Aaero, which might also explain why I haven’t played a musical instrument since high school.