Temple Run 2 (as in the original Temple Run game, just with better graphics and more bells and whistles) takes its cue from the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Harrison Ford gets chased by a giant rolling boulder after stealing a golden idol from an ancient Peruvian temple, thereby setting off all the ancient traps and obstacles -- that are all somehow still in working order – meant to prevent him from leaving with it.
In the game, you play another intrepid explorer (one of several you can unlock after achieving high scores of one kind or another) who has stolen a golden idol and now has to run... the difference here is that you're running down a series of vertiginous bridges above a misty mountain valley below, turning, jumping, ducking, and leaning to avoid fires, spinning spike wheels and crumbling sections of bridge. The point is to run as far as you can, picking up as many coins that are lying around as you can -- they help you unlock special powers and buy new characters.
The big change from the Raiders scenario here is that, instead of a giant boulder, you're being pursued by a twelve-foot galloping monkey demon who is inexplicably wearing a skull mask (at least, I really really hope it's a mask). As if you didn't have to worry about plummeting to your death or slamming into trees and low overpasses, when you stumble over too many obstacles the monkey catches up with you and slams you on the ground. In any event, it's game over.
You see all this from a vantage point above and behind your running explorer, so you don't actually see the galloping monkey demon for most of the game. Only when you hit one of those stumbling obstacles do you actually see its hairy back and grasping arms, coming up behind you. That's when you know that you had better not even so much as misstep again, or you're going to get bodyslammed into oblivion.
It's an intense, fun, and patently simple game, but something happened a few weeks into playing it that changed my thoughts on exactly what's going on in this game, and the implications, frankly, were chilling. It all started when I had to pause the game to attend to something my four-year-old was doing. I had just gotten to a place in the game where the bridge falls away entirely, and my character had to jump on a rope and zipline down to where the bridge picked up again. This is the only time when you change perspective, because the "camera" briefly swings below the character as they slide down the rope.
My pause came just as the angle was changing, and when it stopped I was surprised to see some strange artifacts on the screen. Near the top, I could see four downward pointing arrows, gray and stony-looking, and near the bottom of the screen was a reddish, snaky looking thing that had a small fork at the end. It took me maybe ten seconds to realize what I was looking at... and my blood ran cold.
I was looking out from the inside of the monkey demon's mouth. I had just happened to pause as the swinging "camera" was poised between his upper teeth and tongue. Then I thought about it a little more... I had been doing well. I hadn't stumbled at all during the game so far. I hadn't even seen the monkey demon since the brief prelude to my run where I saw it racing out of the temple to follow me.
So here's how it breaks down, folks. The people who programmed this game could have just set it up so the back of the monkey demon appears when you make that first stumble. But they didn't do that. They set it up so that the monkey demon *is* *always* *there*, *whether* *you* *see* *it* *or* *not*. It is not even onscreen, but it's always invisibly snapping at your heels, ready to leap forward into view the moment you screw up. And even worse, they took the time to give it huge, sharp teeth and a forked tongue, *even* *though* *you* *never* *see* *the* *damned* *thing* *from* *the* *front*, except in that initial glimpse.
That's the moment that it stopped being a game for me. I'm not saying I stopped playing it, but the way I played it changed. It became more of a personal mission to do better, run faster, to stay even farther ahead of that dark, loping thing, even though I now know I can't run fast or far enough to keep it more than two steps behind me. Sometimes it feels like it's the most apt metaphor for life I can think of.
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