Past meets present: Denshi Life 2
Mindware's latest game is a more expansive take on the gameplay concepts introduced in 2023's D Life.
This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Mindware is known — among those who know their work — for their dedication to creating gameplay experiences you haven’t already found elsewhere. They’re also known for adapting simple concepts into those very gameplay experiences, which is where titles like 2008’s WiiWare game published by Nintendo, MaBoShi’s Arcade, came from. The Three Shape Arcade took three games that, if they had been stripped down any further, would not have been games at all. And those aren’t my words, but those of Mindware’s founder, Mikito Ichikawa, aka Micky Albert, who was quoted in the Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers Vol. 2 saying that Circle was made with the mission “to create a game so simple and elegant that if you tried to simplify it any further, it wouldn’t be a game anymore — reduce it to the absolute essentials.”
Simplicity and originality. That intersection is where Mindware is at its best, and it also leads to games that feel as if they have more of a connection to gaming’s past than its present. Denshi Life 2 is the latest release of the studio that follows this ideology, and is both a sequel to and seeming final-form evolution of last summer’s D Life. Denshi Life 2 takes place on one screen — now a full-screen, wider experience compared to D Life’s letterboxed, narrow arrangement — and playing the game itself is simple enough. You click on an area, a circle enlarges as you hold down the button, and you’re scored on what was captured within that circle. There’s more to it than that, however, and succeeding at Denshi Life 2 is another thing entirely. How it all works makes it a throwback to a much different era of arcade games, only it’s 2024 and you can snag the game for a one-time payment rather than feeding quarters endlessly into a cabinet until you get things just right.
Here’s a more descriptive version of Denshi Life 2’s gameplay. You are watching a bunch of colors float around in what is otherwise a black emptiness. These colors are “denshi,” and you’re observing their behavior until you can fulfill your mission. That mission involves “shooting” — like a camera shoots, not like a gun shoots — a specific number of the different colors of denshi in one shot, or specific colors of denshi, and then you see your score added up. If you were able to follow the mission parameters — you “shot” four different color of denshi in one shot when you were supposed to, or you managed to get the correct number of colors of denshi in one capture while avoiding red as you were told to do, and so on — then you get to proceed to the next mission. Failure to complete the mission is a game over, except for in one very specific circumstance: Denshi Life 2 lets you continue on to the next mission, only sans a hefty point bonus, if you accidentally capture just a few denshi from an additional color you weren’t asked to.
There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the gist. You can actually control the “wind” that moves the various denshi around the screen, by pressing numbers one through seven on your keyboard. Look at the image of the title screen above — that’s also, logos aside, what the actual Denshi Life 2 playing area looks like. Those colored circles at the bottom are the various colored denshi you’ll see in each game type, and whichever of the seven is currently selected at the moment will be shown on the right, in an image that is meant to convey movement, since wind will be sent toward that color. Which can also impact other nearby denshi, but it’s about focusing that wind in specific places to setup the kind of shots you need to take for your mission.
Clicking repeatedly on a color will cause more activity to happen to that color — the denshi will “mutate,” per the language used in the original D Life, and their behavior altered. Experimenting with all of this is how you end up being able to score the most possible points in each mission, which, in classic arcade game style, is the goal: posting the highest score you can.
See, you can advance to the next mission fairly easily without scoring many points. Need four colors? Find a spot with just a few of four colors floating around and nothing else around it, and snap the smallest possible photo of the denshi there. You won’t score many points, but you’ll have completed the mission. You can get the “Just” bonus of 3,000 points for doing what was asked of you, but you’ll miss out on additional bonuses scored for capturing X number of total denshi, as well as for taking a much larger photo. You can “beat” the game, or you can master the game, and you need different tactics and approaches for those two very different things. One requires engaging with all of the systems present, but it’s also this method that’s more rewarding.
And that’s thanks to the additional modes of Denshi Life 2. It retains the basic, time-free mode of D Life, as well as its roguelike alternate — more on that in a moment — while adding in a tutorial as well as a caravan mode The caravan mode tasks you with taking as many captures as you can in three minutes — it just rolls out mission after mission for you, and you try to complete as many of them as you can in three minutes or until you fail, whichever comes first. The tutorial replaces what D Life used to explain the game to you, which was just a single-screen set of instructions, such as like you’d find on an arcade cabinet so you know what you’re doing and expected to do before dropping a quarter in. The caravan mode is a great addition, and the opposite of the more basic, timer-less way of playing Denshi Life 2: in a game that’s about analyzing and appreciating the subtle movements and patterns of the denshi flying about the screen, the caravan mode tells you to slam your foot down on the gas and get those pictures of Spider-Man snapped as fast as you can.
The roguelike mode is the most expansive, though, as it’s a balance between the more casual basic mode, and the harried nature of the caravan. And that’s because it has you choosing your mission yourself instead of having it handed down, with the idea being that you complete as many of them as you can from 21 different types, attempting to rack up the highest score you can before failure. While you have a timer that goes across all missions a la the caravan mode, you can also choose to try to win some additional time as a reward in certain missions, extending your run. Or! You can sacrifice precious seconds in order to select a huge, score-altering multiplier for that mission, betting on being able to gain the seconds back elsewhere at a later mission select.
The above screenshot actually shows this moment of choice: you can earn 35 seconds for your time if you take a four-color photo that includes blue, red, and purple denshi, but your score isn’t modified at all. Or, you can take a five-color photo, of any denshi colors, and earn a 4X score multiplier for doing so, at the cost of 20 seconds of time. If you take a photo that gets exactly five colors, earning the “Just” bonus, and it’s a big photo (another bonus) that has hundreds and hundreds of denshi contained within it (yet another bonus), that 4X is going to count for way more than those 20 seconds you cashed in for the multiplier. It’s this constant risk/reward of the mission structure, placed alongside a game with a high failure rate given the literal ever-changing winds, that makes Denshi Life 2’s roguelike mode its central, and most successful, experience.
Denshi Life 2 has some background worth explaining. The composer for this game is Yuriko Keino, who also composed the music for classic Namco golden age games like Xevious, Dragon Buster, and Dig Dug. To reflect Denshi Life 2 releasing in 2024 but playing and looking like something from that experimental era of arcade games, Keino’s soundtrack has both modern and retro options, with each a fit in different ways. The vibe of a spacey, ethereal experience is better felt with the modern soundtrack, but if you’re set on pretending that you’re in a dark arcade, sitting in front of a cabinet, trying to follow instructions well so you don’t have to buy another credit and try again, the retro soundtrack plays its role well. The sound has also been revamped compared to D Life’s so that it reflects changes in the gameplay environment — given Keino’s work on Dig Dug was one of the first instances of dynamic audio in a video game, it’s a nifty nod to the past that also fits the present game.
On the subject of Dig Dug, Ichikawa is a known fan of that classic, and it’s a game that’s clearly informed Mindware’s work over the decades. There was nothing quite like Dig Dug at the time, which was both iterating on existing concepts (arcade maze games) and building something entirely new (diggers), but it resonated with players looking for something that was easy to get into despite its newness, and would take real skill to fully master. Whereas Dig Dug pulled from Pac-Man for its maze design — and then subverted the expectations of the genre by making the player responsible for creating the maze rather than presenting one to navigate — Denshi Life 2’s inspiration comes from outside of video games. Specifically, the work of British mathematician John Horton Conway, who, in 1970, came up with “Conway’s Game of Life.”
Conway’s Game of Life, or just Life, is a “cellular automaton,” which, to keep it simple, is a bunch of cells arranged in a specific shape within a grid, with state changes occurring over time due to the neighbors of each cell and the rules governing them. You can find Life playing out on its Wikipedia page, on websites dedicated to it, and hey, within Denshi Life 2, as well. Each cell in the grid is either “populated” or “unpopulated,” and that state will impact the future states of the cells around them, based on these rules, courtesy that Wiki page:
Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
Similarly, the denshi of Denshi Life 2 are in a constant state of interacting with their neighbors — the denshi overlap, they crash into each other, they are absorbed into larger structures or spat out to fly across the playing area, all depending on their current states. Changing the wind and altering behaviors, or causing the denshi to avoid each other, will change their states, and the interactions that will arise from those states. The basic mode exists to be a casual way to play Denshi Life 2, but also so you can see just how the denshi themselves interact with each other and move about, to get a sense of what can be done and needs to be done to get the kinds of captures your mission asks you to.
It’s easy to get lost in watching their movements, which is also what makes the timed modes of the game both a challenge and appealing. It’s easy to get lost, yes, but you can’t get lost. You have to focus, to see the patterns, to understand the behavior, and then snap that photo when the moment is right and the potential for a killer score is high. There’s a simplicity to it all, but an obvious beauty to the systems, too, and they’re both reasons to come back for more.
Denshi Life 2 releases through Steam on November 29. A review copy was provided by Mindware Co, Ltd., and played on Steam through Windows.
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