Eventually you’re seeing ten-minute matches. Then the match time creeps up to two minutes. When players first play Nidhogg matches will be over in a minute or less. Sometimes they stand still, and you run into their sword.) Maybe if you run right at them, they’ll jump? Sometimes, they don’t jump. (This happens, of course, because psyching out your opponent in Nidhogg is about as valuable a technique as stabbing your opponent in Nidhogg. If you press the attack button while jumping, you perform a dive-kick that can knock your opponent down and stun them-yet this action carries the risk of accidental impalement on your opponent’s sword.Īlmost no moment in Nidhogg is funnier for spectators and more emasculating for a player, however, than when one runs directly into the other player’s sword. ![]() If a player has no sword, they can punch and kick and crouch-kick their enemy to death. If a player is holding a sword forward at a medium height, and standing still, then they can deflect a thrown blade. ![]() So Nidhogg occupies an interesting position, if we’re discussing its rules as a sport: Sometimes (usually?), approaching victory requires you to put yourself onto defense by giving up offense.Īll of the player actions interlock and play with each other in densely cute ways. You’re fighting one opponent at a time, yes, though if you have the lead and the right to advance, “fighting” might mean “running”: Every inch counts. Nidhogg plays out over a series of short-term conflicts inside a long-term conflict. If you throw your sword, now you don’t have a sword. Throw your sword while jumping, if that seems like a thing to do. Tap downward while running to roll through your enemy, and (usually) under his sword. Hold up and press the stab button to throw your sword. By pressing up and down while standing, you can raise or lower your sword. You don’t need to think about the world or the narrative just now: For now, know that the game is mechanically air-tight. You run by a crowd of cheering onlookers, and earn your prize: the right to be eaten by the titular Nidhogg, a dragon-worm-snake-beast which is so cool it turns human sacrifice into an honor worth killing for. If the yellow player gets all the way to the right, the yellow player wins. To win a game of Nidhogg, you must advance to the goal at the ultimate limit of your necessary direction. This is how you end up with so many dead bodies by the end of a game. When one member of the team dies,another rushes to fill in. I like to think they’re all members of a team. Here, you’re free to imagine whatever you want: The players can be clones, or they can be Looney Tunes reincarnations. Move forward far enough, and you’ll find your opponent waiting for you. Once you kill your opponent, you are free to move forward. To kill your opponent, you must stab your opponent (or throw your sword, or kick your opponent and then break their neck). The yellow fencer must advance to the right the orange fencer must advance to the left.Ī player earns the right to advance in their necessary direction only when they have killed their opponent. The left player is a yellow fencer the right player is an orange fencer. It is a spectator-hyper-friendly speed-decision-making exercise wherein the decisions regard position and action. To put it into bland terms, Nidhogg is a two-player competitive one-on-one minimalist electronic sport with a fencing metaphor and the rules of tug of war. Heck, depending on your opponent, it might actually be more fun to watch than it is to play (and I mean that in the best possible way). Nidhogg is that rare breed of videogame that is certainly as fun to watch as it is to play. ![]() I have, for many reasons or many others, been to plenty of independent-game-celebrating events in the past four years, so I’ve played Nidhogg many times-and, more importantly, I’ve seen dozens (hundreds) of other people playing Nidhogg against each other. Either that, or you’d know that it has something to do with Norse mythology. ![]() Actually, your brain would probably try to convince you it’s something boring, like a Scandinavian band that isn’t very good. I can only imagine what you’d think a Nidhogg is if you are not into independent videogames. If you haven’t attended numerous videogame-related gatherings over the past four years, you might not know what Nidhogg is.
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