Logfolk Graveyard is where it happened. There should be a plaque really. In a game where time can become a bright fizzing blur, I somehow remember the exact moment. I had been zooming through OlliOlli World until that point – always cheery, sometimes doing well, sometimes just scraping it. But then Logfolk Graveyard came along with the optional challenge: Advance trick through a Ghost.
OlliOlli World review
- Publisher: Private Division, Take Two Interactive
- Developer: Roll7
- Platform: Played on Switch
- Availability: Out on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch on the 8th of Feb.
I bloody love ghosts. All levels here have optional challenges, but that ghost! I realised I definitely wanted to trick through it, to advance-trick through it even! So I had to do what I so rarely choose to do in games. I had to do something that, in a game with the sheer headlong pelt of OlliOlli World, seems like breaking an underlying law. I had to go back. Back to the tutorial I had sped through hours before and forgotten, back to the heart of the advance tricks system to gain a proper understanding of these beautiful, terrible things. Back so I could get them down.
OlliOlli World is the latest and wildest entry in a sublime series of 2D skateboarding games. The basics have remained unchanged for obvious reasons. Back in 2014, Roll7 devised a stick-flicking system that seemed to capture skateboarding in the very joints – in the knees and ankles, and in the moment at which the human body becomes a lively species of car jack or shock absorber. You hold and then release the stick in order to trick: choose a direction and see what happens. Can you land it? Can you link it together with other tricks? Can you incorporate a grab? Whatever.