I was thinking about this this week specifically as it applies to video games, humanity’s only artistic medium where you can absolutely fuck up your own power fantasy. (Specifically, I’ve been playing Haste, the procedurally generated run-and-jumper from Peak studio Landfall that came out last year, but only percolated up into my attention last week.) This has always been the Sonic paradox: The exact moment your exhilarating and life-affirming sense of speed and freedom in those Sega classics comes to a life-de-affirming halt is the first time you miss a jump, going from 100 to 0 courtesy of some asshole piece of checkerboarded level geometry. Video games are great at replicating physical superpowers, but superspeed is partially mental: You can’t just run fast, you have to think fast, and that’s not something our brains are naturally inclined to do.
Haste tackles this, smartly, by simplifying as much as it can: Your player character Zoe starts every one of the game’s levels at the wrong end of a world about to collapse down to nothingness, with a procedurally generated track of obstacle-strewn land between her and a portal to safety. Your controls are deliberately limited: You can aim Zoe, but there’s no dedicated jump button; she takes off into the sky when you send her automatically racing form over a sufficiently steep hill, and your only real control over verticality (at least, until you unlock a few upgrades) is to make her fall faster, allowing you to pick up a speed boost by coming down evenly on a following hill. What you’re mostly doing while playing, then, is tweaking: Making small adjustments to Zoe’s movements, usually in the air, to squeak through the obstacles rapidly racing toward you from a fair bit of distance away. And that’s where Landfall’s game comes as close as any I’ve seen to cracking The Sonic Paradox.
It’s not that you don’t slam into walls in Haste; you absolutely do. (And that’s before you get into the game’s more metaphorical roadblocks, like a nasty tendency to crash while navigating menus in my PlayStation version of the game.) But by taking speed as the default assumption, and then asking the player to mostly just adjust trajectories, rather than make any big dramatic turns or more error-prone movements, Haste manages to hit a considerable tempo while leaving players plenty of tools to deal with the problems zooming over the horizon. When it works—especially in the big boss fights that you reach after Slay The Spire-ing your way through a randomly generated map of challenges and upgrade opportunities—it’s exhilarating. Weaving my way through a bullet hell’s worth of on-screen lasers while zeroing in on my target generates in me those little “Dash Parr realizes he can run on water” giggles in a way that few speed-focused games have ever managed.
The obvious comparison point, for the series Haste is so obviously cribbing from, is 2022’s Sonic Frontiers—and not just because that game’s drab, anonymous landscapes resemble the procedurally generated ones that Haste spits out as a matter of course. Frontiers’ best moments also come down to points where the player’s options are narrowed down to an immediate set of choices—also usually in boss fights against gigantic mechs, to the point that Haste all but steals Frontier’s great “run along a snake-like robot’s back to reach its head” fights—as opposed to its wider exploration gameplay. The difference is that, while Haste doesn’t give players a ton of control when they hit supersonic speeds, it never straight-up takes it away from players the way Sonic games (including Frontiers) tend to, anytime you hit a rail or set of bouncing trampolines, cheap hacks to make the player feel fast without giving them the actual freedom of superspeed. Sonic has spent 35 years trying to beat this problem, but it’s always had to do so while also being a big-budget video game required to provide players with a suitable variety of activities, even when those activities are not to the game’s benefit. By focusing on just the one thing it wants to be good at and shucking the rest, Haste beats Sonic at its own game.
Haste is by no means a perfect video game. It has one really good trick that it plays extremely well, and once you’ve hit the limits of that sense of zooming across the landscape, you’ve seen all it really has to offer. (It also just gets punishingly difficult; losing 10 minutes’ worth of progress because the level generator stuck you with a series of nigh-unavoidable traps is a lousy feeling.) But it is, I think, as close as non-car-focused video gaming has gotten to capturing that feeling of what it’s like to be a Pietro Maximoff or Barry Allen, dancing through the crossfire while outracing every other thing on the planet. The fact that it does so by helping you be better at being fast, rather than making the world slow down to catch up, is a big part of what makes it work.