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I would like to express at the start here that, while I gave it my all, I did not finish Clustertruck. I got close, but in many ways, I was a million miles from the peak of the game's difficulty.

Clustertruck is a game releassed in 2016 by Landfall Studios, a game development team who have made a lot of projects, almost one of which you've certainly heard of. Haste, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and related works, Peak, Stick Fight, the list goes on. Clustertruck released somewhat nesseled in between their more notable works, and has kinda faded into the background, but I remember it making a pretty notable splash when it dropped. TABS had already given the studio some ammount of name recognition in the youtube landscape, so it's only natural they'd pick up some steam with their second wacky physics-based game, even if it plays wildly different.

It would be very reductive of me to say 'what TABS did for the RTS, Clustertruck does for the platformer', and it isn't even all that true. But at the same time, it's pretty clear the game delights in playing with the absurdity of making a platformer where all the platforms are dynamic, moving physics objects, and seeing what comes as a result of that little twist. The gimmick is Clustertruck. If the platforms in Clustertruck were static, non-physics objects, it would be a fundamentally different game, and the theming impacts a lot of the game's feel. The jumps in Clustertruck have a lot of horizontal momentum, a frankly absurd amount. It's a big part of what gives the game its' frantic pace. Every jump feels like a sprint at high velocity. You are never slow in Clustertruck, even when you're not pushing buttons. Because the platforms are trucks that are always driving, you are always moving. Everythings fast, chaotic madness. And that's fun! A platformer this manic is delightful to experience.

However, this chaos also has its drawbacks, and that's where I start to get critical. The fact that all the platforms are purely dynamic results in a lot of stages which become nearly-unwinnable due to things just not going your way. The trucks with clump up in one spot a million miles from the goal, or a truck that was at a very useful position for you one run will be just to the side enough that you can't make a jump in another. The game's addicting sense of speed in inertia suddenly fumbles and you're suddenly not enthralled in the sense of speed, you're pissed off at this broken ass game. These frustrations can be partially alleviated with the game's many purchasable abilities, most of which serve to give the player options for micro-adjusting movement mid-jump, but only partially, and the additional height they tend to provide creates problems in the game's many enclosed stages, which feel awful to play when making contact with a non-truck surface once sends you right back to the start. Most of the game's stages are short enough that this isn't too much of a setback, but. Well, there's no putting it off any longer.

These frustrations are not why I did not finish Clustertruck. I weathered them, persisted for the enthralling sense of speed, all the way up until 9-10, the final stage of the game; a climactic battle with the devil. Conceptually, the devil fight is a fun way to close out your game. All you have to do is jump through a ring of trucks, up along the static path of trucks on the devil's arm and body, narrowly avoiding the walls and overhang which will kill you instantly, and get to the button on his head before the lava evelops him and kills you, then do it again, twice.

Attentive readers may already see where I am going with this. The ultimate problem with the devil is twofold: One, the devil takes more hits than you, and the stage is already split into two parts. Just the first hit feels longer than much of the game's stages, and doing it three times results in a stage that lasts 10 minutes in a game where many levels can be beaten in 30 seconds. The other issue is the assent. In most walkthroughs of the game, the main solution I saw to ascending over the devil was to make use of a physics exploit with the game's jetpack ability and high angle slopes, not the static climb over sitll trucks. While this is a Neat Trick, a part of me also feels like it being so commonplace is an expression of how out of place it feels. As I said earlier, Clustertruck's movement on static platforms is no Clustertruck at all. The high velocity horizontal jumps feel much, much worse when we are meant to use them for standard platforming faire rather than when leaping from truck to truck. The sum result is that the final stage feels completely different from the rest of the game and substatially worse to play to boot.

But as I said, the game released in 2016, almost a decade ago, and it's apparent that some number of devs at landfall felt the same. While I've only been able to play a sliver of it so far, their later release Haste has a lot of what I love about Clustertruck with none of the frustrations. Even the though it also features a number of three-hits-after-some-platoforming-building-up-to-it boss fights, they feel a lot more naturally integrated to the game's enthralling freerunning gameplay, and the elation of landing a good jump has never felt more Right. It's everything I wished Clustertruck had been, and that's the kind of visible improvement from a studio I love to see.