If you’ve watched those old movies or TV shows that fantasized about what our lives might be like in the future, you’ve probably seen people playing futuristic games in ultramodern settings. And you may have thought, “Wow. I want to play those games. I want to be there.”
Guess what? You’re there. The game’s called Tranquility, and it represents an entirely new kind of game that you play on your Mac over the Internet.
We use the term “game” loosely to describe Tranquility, because it’s like nothing you’ve ever played before. And while it does have definitive objectives, it’s also a highly sensual environment that you can enjoy without pursuing any kind of goal at all. In fact, if you want to, you can just bounce around to music.
Space Oddity
When you start a new game, you’ll find yourself drifting in what appears to be three-dimensional outer space, full of thousands of tiny stars. But this space has different characteristics than any outer space we know. For instance, it has sound. It also has gravity, so if you do nothing, you’ll float slowly downward until you bounce against the floor of space, which looks like a giant grid.
You’ll also notice a vast number of colorful two-dimensional shapes moving through space. These are called platforms. And once in a while, high up in space, you’ll spy a spherical, satellite-like device called a spinner. Once you hit seven spinners, you graduate to another level of play. (More about levels later — for now, we’ll focus on the experience and mechanics of the game.)
You boost yourself higher by bouncing off the floor as well as off the surfaces of the many platforms floating through space. And if you bounce through a platform from underneath, you’ll gain greater altitude than if you bounce off a platform’s surface.
The goal of Tranquility is to launch yourself high enough to collide with the spherical spinners.
You move through space by using your mouse and your keyboard space bar. Your mouse moves you forward, backward, right or left. The space bar accelerates your descent. So, for example, if you find yourself floating too high above a platform, press the space bar to lose altitude more quickly and hit the platform before it floats away underneath you. The space bar also helps you bounce harder off the floor and off other objects. It’s exhilarating when you finally bounce off a platform just right and catapult yourself through a whole series of platforms above you, soaring higher than ever before.
Relax, Don’t Do It
To play Tranquility successfully, you need to learn to slow down your movements. This is a subtle game in which you make progress by relaxing and overcoming your innate urge to react quickly. (It’s called Tranquility for a reason.)
Relax and explore geometric worlds.
Even if you’re not prone to Type-A behavior, it still takes a while to get the hang of the physics of the game, especially in understanding navigation, how to approach objects moving in space, how to judge distances, how gravity works, and so on.
To help you get in the right mood, the developers have created a relaxing and ever-changing musical score that’s a remarkable part of the game. Whenever you bounce off or through a platform, the game responds by playing rich, harplike tones. It’s as if you’re playing the platforms like musical instruments.
The sounds are so soothing and meditative that the developers even provide a way for you to listen to Tranquility music without playing the game, so that you can enjoy it when you work, or before you fall asleep at bedtime.
Meet the Spinners
Once you get the gist of how to move around and launch yourself high into space, start looking for the elusive spinners. Sometimes they’re easy to spot right away, but often they’re camouflaged by the thousands of objects floating around. Collide with seven spinners, and you’ll arrive at a new visual realm with new challenges, which may include such things as unusual platform shapes that move in different ways, or variations in gravity. After you complete each realm, you earn a Tranquility card that reflects your new player status.
The Tranquility website offers free training and downloadable working demos, but the game truly becomes a customized experience once you pay the modest membership fee. When you play as a member, Tranquility learns from you, studying and analyzing your moves to provide you with playing challenges suited to your level of ability.
The Tranquility server also scores your game, giving you information on how well (or how poorly) you bounced around and achieved the game’s objectives. Essentially, you constantly compete against yourself to see how tranquil you can become.
What a Difference a Day Makes
Tranquility is never the same game twice. Every time you play, you have a new experience, seeing new objects in different configurations moving in different ways, with different patterns of music. Even the free demo games change every day.
But we can’t fully do justice to a game as unusual as Tranquility by describing it — you must try it to understand and appreciate it. With a free demo download and training just a click away, this is very easy to do.
For the ultimate immersive experience, we recommend strapping on your headphones and playing Tranquility in a darkened room. Bouncing off platforms in a virtual world totally beats bouncing off the walls in the real one.
Tranquility available from TQworld