When I was a long-distance runner at school, breathing control was the most critical thing. We were never really taught this. It was an art you acquired through practice: how to breathe before a race, saturating your blood with O2 without feeling dizzy; when to allow shorter, emergency breaths and when to employ restraint measures; when to deepen your breaths and charge up for the hill attack.
And then how to organize your body around breathing, straightening your posture to expand your lungs, without moving too far back and wasting muscle power; how to breathe in time with your step and arm movement to escalate your momentum and reduce your completion time by a minute of that wonderful feeling. All this plus various stupid psychological war tricks of my own invention. When I was overtaking or being overtaken, I would cover my mouth on that side and breathe through the other side of my mouth to make it look like I was barely out of breath at all.
Video games rarely require us to think about breathing, which makes sense considering most of us don’t actually think about breathing most of the time. There are a few where awareness of your avatar’s lungs is critical – in Call Of Duty you’ll hold your breath to stabilize your crosshair, and you’ll feel its absence in the woozy animations of a Souls character lacking stamina. But it wasn’t until the brilliant, buffoonish, irritating and disturbing Mask Quest that I played a game that deautomatized breathing and turned it into a mechanic, a button you had to deliberately press and release to fill a cartoon diagram of your character’s chest with air. If you don’t do this, you will die within seconds.
This adds significant difficulty to a game that’s already at the bruising end of the celestial cosmos, a precision platformer where brushing against a hazard kills you instantly, a game that challenges you to deal with a grim volley of bullets flying in opposite directions through a stack sidewalks or survive a maze of ladders while being harassed by a drone. Now try to do all this, remembering to inhale and exhale. Don’t just spam the button: there’s a carbon dioxide level indicator underneath the cartoon lungs, and if you empty it with uncoordinated, rapid breaths, you’ll experience hyperventilation. You must maintain the rhythm of your breathing, synchronizing your movements with those of murderous policemen who seemingly do not need to breathe, who seem lifeless and inhuman in their regularity.
As the title might suggest, Mask Quest is a “political” game, but not in the sense of wearing a moral on its sleeve. It’s more of a thorough and quirky examination of a historical moment than a statement. The mask you are asking about is a blue and white respirator from the times of Covid-19, and the Mission itself is a journey to various parts of a state-of-the-art Western city in hopes of finding a store that still has such a mask available. Between platforming challenges, you’ll be surrounded by armies of police, with groups of people waving placards announcing brutal pandemic restrictions.
Mask Quest is not an argument against protecting yourself from Covid, but both in its premise and in its scant writing in the style of toilet graffiti it expresses a huge ambivalence about the enforcement of social distancing: how it can be used as an excuse to thwart collective organizing, and, above all, how this intersects with discriminatory policies.
It’s a study in systematic racism that appears to draw inspiration (originally another word for inhale) from specific atrocities. I won’t elaborate on the analogies, at least not more than I already have, but your character is Black, all your enemies are cops, and the entire game is one large fight for breathing. Perhaps there is also an overlapping examination of ableism in public spaces, although I do not want to confuse ableism with racism. The cops aren’t breathing again. By requiring you to do it manually, the game turns breathing into a disability for you.
Mask Quest really teaches you to hate cops. One of the nastiest touches is the lyrics of “When You Die”, which clearly blames the victim – never “a cop shot you”, but “you were shot”, never “a cop beat you to death”, but “you touched a cop”. However, even as it horribly destroys the aged bill, it also transforms them into toys, reducing them to props for platform games with repetitive behaviors that can be played reliably given enormous concentration and persistence.
Some of them lunge at you and shout incoherently – time it right and you’ll be able to sneak under their jumps. Others stand and shoot monotonously in both directions. Some carry riot shields that act like pachinko bumpers, throwing you diagonally and yes, allowing you to reach areas you can’t dash to. Some fire gas grenades that lock you in place if you try to take a breath. Most nefarious of all are the drones, which take up residence like wasps even when you’re out of sight; their movements are a bit clumsy, which sometimes allows them to be lured into field traps, but it also means they can surprise you.
The only way to fight is with air in your lungs. You can blow away the drones as you exhale, which may give you a second to get to safety, but it’s not a foolproof strategy. You can also blow sails to power boats, including fuzz crewed boats. The most promising play is the concept of synchronized breathing as a form of resistance, a gathering whirlwind that throws the organs of repression into chaos. As you explore the city, you’ll meet friends who can be magically summoned to pee on the statues, breaking them and thus drawing outraged enforcers away from previously sealed off areas.
Of course, huffing angrily at drones and statues looks very stupid. Overall, Mask Quest walks a razor-thin line with its humor. It can be fun to fall into the water, accidentally inhale it, and then have to spit it all out when you reach the ground. There is a Charlie Chaplin-esque absurdity of coughing with intensity while jumping through tear gas, even as the last few percent of oxygenated blood leaks out. The caption is absurd: protesters shouting things like “no.” But sloppy comedy never hides ugliness. It fits this injustice. You are the butt of every joke.
Visually, the game seems intentionally improvised, like Canabalt powered by Kid Pix, but the breathing animations and accompanying vocalizations – personally provided by co-creator undefdev – are powerful. When you hold down the button, your character stares like Kirby and you can almost feel the restorative oxygen flowing through their tubes.
The game’s clever level design is as double-edged as its humor. It gracefully weaponizes and politicizes the casual sadism of any game that defines itself as a series of goals and punishments. There are moments, usually during your first few attempts at a level, when you marvel at the ingenuity of it all, at how cleverly and vindictively more familiar platforming concepts combine with the difficulty of breathing. Later levels are pleasantly abstract, almost completely omitting the city backdrop. You’ll ride on platforms that move quickly, forcing you to jump over bullets as you catch up to them. You’ll employ these pachinko riot shields to rise above the gas clouds and inhale the sky. There were many moments when I thought about Fez, Braid, and other indie favorites of the Xbox Live Arcade era.
I’m wondering – again guided by my memories of cross-country running – about how breathing mechanics could be incorporated into various other games. Or are there any existing mechanics or procedures in video games, such as exploring free space in a bullet hell shooter, that could be productively reconsidered as breathing. But I’m not sure our goal is really to add another tool to the game design repertoire.
Again, Mask Quest is punishing: I died hundreds of times while playing it. The only things that throw at you are extremely generous checkpoints with quick reloads, and sometimes that just exacerbates the spiral of failure as you throw yourself into puzzles that measure victory in pixels. I haven’t sworn out raucous or gotten furious this often in years, and that feels appropriate for a game that systematizes injustice in such a fun and so terrible way. Perhaps the best outcome is for you to stop messing around and just admit that what they’re asking you to do is extremely unpleasant.
