D Life review

Mindware’s latest work feels like a mixture of retro coin-op and an interactive art exhibit.

In 1970, British mathematician John Horton Conway created The Game of Life (often shortened to “Life”), a seminal work in computer simulation. After positioning an array of cells on a grid, the model would spring into existence, modeling interactions between individual units. Cells would die off if they either had too few or too many adjacent units, mimicking the effects of isolation and overpopulation. But seemingly deceased cells could be resurrected when they had exactly three neighbors.

While this might sound rather boring in written description, watching a game of Life play out could be rather alluring. Here, some patterns would grow wildly, others would repeat cyclically, while some would descend toward stagnation. If the refresh speed for each generation was fast enough, Life could become hypnotic. Its movement would resemble time-lapse photography of a culture growing in a petri dish, or even a visualization of urban populations viewed across decades.

When Second Place Still Feels Like Winning

Conway’s simulation is at the core of D Life, the latest effort from Mindware’s Mikito Ichikawa (aka Micky G. Albert). Here, a fluid light show flows across the vertically-oriented playfield. The borders optionally display instructions imitating the appearance of a table-top machine, with a hundred-yen sticker helping to suggest the feeling you’re stumbled on an obscure arcade relic. This illusion of D Life being a forgotten game from the ’80s is assisted by 8-bit fonts and a blissful soundtrack from Yuriko Keino, who wrote the music for Super Pac-Man and Dig Dug. Expectedly, earning a spot on the local leaderboard earns a chiptune serenade that is unbearably soothing. Like Namco’s games of old, there are even different tunes for first and second place.

D Life’s single anachronism is rooted in the interaction between six colors of cells. Sure, the palette is in line with the restrained number of hues 80s coin-ops could display. But it’s obvious that a modern CPU is driving the simulation. D Life’s cells dance with fluidity and dynamism that would be impossible to render on older hardware. In execution, the game’s adaptation of Life resembles an interactive art exhibit. While it’s not a requirement for success, the game allows you to push individual colors around, creating vertical or horizontal winds that can scatter cells. As D Life’s attract screens announce, computational power has exponentially grown 10,000x since Conway’s original simulation.

Ring Around the Cellular Simulation

Across D Life’s Basic and Time Limit Modes the goal is the same: capture a subset of colors. This is accomplished by moving the mouse around to direct a pulsating cursor. Holding down the left mouse button draws a circle that increases in diameter as long as you hold the button down. So, if D Life requests three colors, you need to ensure that there are only a trio of hues in the ring’s interior. Given that the individual cells are pixel-sized, it’s easy to overlook a stray cell sometimes. Wisely, the game has an allotment for outliers, so those two abandoned cyan cells won’t automatically end your game.

But that’s not to say that D Life is a pushover. Rapidly assessing the number of colors in an area is probably not a proficiency that we habitually practice. Occasionally, the game can feel a bit punitive when you release the button just a few milliseconds too soon, neglecting to capture cells of a specific color. Ideally, D Life would replicate the system of retro titles and offer multiple chances. I’d also love to see the size of circle growth intensify over the game’s six stages.

Conclusion

Meanwhile, Time Limit Mode imposes a countdown on each stage, as well as specific colors requirements (“must include purple and green”). But at the end of each stage, you are offered two different options for the following round, granting different amounts of extra time and even the possibility of scoring multipliers. Sporadically, the random number generator will feel compassionate offering an easy six-color shot, albeit with a significant time deduction. While the additional mode contributes some longevity, you’ll likely be wanting further variations before long.

While you’ll likely have to tweak the button mapping if you want to control the wind, D Life plays well on the Steam Deck. Like many retro-influenced games, it probably won’t uphold your interest across protracted play sessions. But D Life is remarkably enjoyable across brief sessions, where its synthesis of sinuous cell movement and challenge of scanning for color clusters feels utterly distinct. Much like Ichikawa’s Space Mouse 2, this is one of those diminutive games that deserves a permanent spot on your hard drive. When you’re reluctant to make a dent in the latest 40-hour epic, games like D Life are ideal.

D Life was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher