Ian here—

Playing like a pint-sized mashup of Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels and Gaspar Noë’s Enter the Void, Bendon Chung’s Thirty Flights of Loving (Blendo Games, 2012) packs more scintillating and beguiling details about its characters and their world into its hallucinatory, hyper-concentrated ten minutes of gameplay than most games manage in 30 hours. Bootleggers, an airport, a rooftop party, shootouts, memories, regrets, a violent end … or several? A love affair … a betrayal? All of this and much more (including a highly educational demonstration of Bernoulli’s principle) jostle together wildly in this tantalizing gem of a short.

Okay, I’ll step out of “breathless, enraptured critic” mode. Thirty Flights of Loving is an interesting game for many reasons. One of these reasons is that it steals quite a lot cinematic language—including some very interesting and unusual applications of the forms of cinema, like first-person cutting. Quick example of what this actually looks like below the jump:

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