Don't Look Back

Don't Look Back is a black-and-white platformer that Terry Cavanagh built on the motif of the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice without ever using a single word. The player sets out through the caves and chasms of the underworld, picks up a weapon to fend off shadow monsters, and slowly climbs toward the goal - the woman he must save. The controls are deliberately spare - just movement, jumping, and shooting - so all attention belongs to the atmosphere and forward progress. The path leads across dozens of short screens, each adding a slightly harder combination of enemies and chasms, so that despite the minimal controls the game gradually builds tension.

The visuals consist of nothing but black silhouettes on a white background, accompanied by quiet, almost ambient music, which places the game among the most economical yet most striking Flash titles of its time. It is precisely this austerity that heightens the final twist, in which the game plays with what the player has actually been doing all along, recasting the previous tens of minutes of play. Without a single line of speech, it manages to tell a tragedy that humanity has known for thousands of years. The twist also forces the player to look back at their own progress and ask whether what they did was truly a rescue, or instead just another repetition of the same mistake.

The game was created in 2009 as one of Terry Cavanagh's first notable titles, after which he built a name for himself among independent game creators and later also made the more successful VVVVVV. Within the scene of web games from the end of the decade, Don't Look Back belongs among the works that proved story and emotion don't need a budget or dialogue - pure form and a well-timed twist are enough. That is precisely why the title still appears in overviews of the most significant independent games of the turn of the 2000s, even though in terms of controls and length it is one of the most modest games on this platform.

Why play it: Players who appreciate a short and powerful wordless experience get, in a matter of a few dozen minutes, one of the most economical stories browser games ever offered.