If you were going to train for an athletic event, how would you do it? Would you get up at the crack of dawn to sprint round a freezing race track? Would you hit the gym at midnight, dedicated where everyone else is giving up? Would you just try and find space in your busy schedule wherever you could? All of these methods are fine, but hey – they’re a little conventional.
How about convincing Death to chase you through a series of crumbling castles and creepy caves? It’s not the standard way to approach training, but it’s certain to help you get in your cardio for the day. There are a few stumbling blocks here; Death probably isn’t the most amenable fellow, and you’ll have to find a way to contact him. Still, there’s money to be made in this training method.
That thought certainly seems to have crossed the mind of Dedalord, developer of the great game Running Fred. Okay, so Fred probably isn’t actually trying to get his ten thousand steps a day by sprinting for his life away from the Grim Reaper. Still, there isn’t a huge amount of narrative context here, so if that’s how you get your jollies, you may as well imagine that’s the case.
It doesn’t really matter what Fred is doing in his current circumstances. What matters is how he’s going to get out. The answer to that question lies with you, the player. The aim of Running Fred is to guide Fred out of the deadly maze in which he’s managed to find himself. Along the way, you’ll dodge traps, chasms, and various other ways in which Fred can fail in his mission.
The control setup for Running Fred is refreshingly simple. You’ll move Fred with the arrow keys and make him jump with the space bar. There’s a nice fluidity of movement in Running Fred that is absent from many games of this genre. Moving Fred from left to right is done in a pleasingly analog way, with none of the snapping between discrete grid-based tiles that’s a mainstay of endless runners.
That fluidity is crucial to understanding the game’s controls, which you’ll need to do if you want to make it through each of Running Fred’s levels. The game’s Adventure mode – which may as well be its “main” mode – takes Fred through a succession of linear stages. The levels increase in complexity and difficulty as one plays, culminating in a particularly difficult sequence in temple stage High Stakes.
It’s a testament to the high quality of Running Fred’s design that the game never once feels too difficult, despite it ramping up fairly quickly. The hazards are designed in such a way that it’s almost always possible to predict exactly where they’re going to land and to react accordingly. Sometimes, a hazard will catch you unawares, but it never feels like the game’s fault.
Part of that is also down to Dedalord’s excellent level design. There isn’t a sequence in Running Fred that feels poorly thought out or ill-executed. Hazards are consistently chained together with thought and consideration. Only one or two sections feel a little bit unfair, and even those can be easily surmounted with just one or two attempts to get to know the level geography.
A large part of Running Fred’s appeal can also be attributed to its excellent presentation. The game has gone for a sort of Saturday morning cartoon-style aesthetic, all popping eyeballs and stylized visuals. This style suits the game; even as the difficulty threatens to become frustrating, the graphics and sound design defuse any tension the player might be feeling.
Paradoxically for an endless runner, there’s a great sense of freedom in Running Fred. A lot of this is down to the aforementioned excellent control scheme, but the ace up the game’s sleeve is its unlockable skills. By paying a small amount of in-game currency, players can gain access to new movement skills for Fred. Most of these are necessary to traverse later levels, so it’s a question of when you’ll acquire them, not if.
Once you obtain new skills, you can either press forward and use them to make progress or you can return to older levels and see what they hold now you’ve got new abilities. This adds a backtracking element to the game that feels welcome. There’s something compelling about returning to old stages with new powers and finding new ways to get through them. In some ways, this parallels RPG-style progression systems but there’s none of the tedious number-crunching of which those games can sometimes be guilty.
Running Fred is a truly generous game. Not only is there a fully fleshed-out adventure mode, but there’s also an Endless mode for players to test their skills. The Endless mode takes the basic geometry and aesthetic of each level and simply prompts players to play until they can’t any more. Similarly, there’s a Challenge mode for players who feel they’ve mastered the controls. You’ll struggle to run out of things to do in Running Fred.
This is a truly special game. It’s not often that something so holistic and complete comes along in the freemium industry. Running Fred doesn’t invent its own genre, but it doesn’t need to. Instead, it’s happy to simply allow players to play around with its tight, polished mechanics and its well-designed stages. Come for a few minutes, stay for a few hours.
