I have never, my mother will be relieved to hear, partaken in the use of hallucinogens or hard drugs. As far as I can tell, video games like 140, a blissful one-hour trip, seem to do a decent enough job of emulating the enjoyment of psychedelia. I'm happy to settle for strange experiences like this 2D platformer, which is so surreal that it calls into question the purity of its creator's mind.
140's abstraction makes it sound convoluted, but its platforming mechanics are easy to understand in practice. Your avatar for exploration is a morphing shape; using nothing more than the arrow keys, you move left, you move right, you jump, and you fall. You circumvent obstacles using logic and timing, hunting floating orbs that serve as keys to unlock doors. The monochromatic minimalism initially bears resemblance to Limbo, the marvelous, mystifying platformer which designer Jeppe Carlsen worked on at developer Playdead, but color of the world, the music within it, the undulating backgrounds, and the structure of a space all change when keys unlock a new remix.
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