Recently, I was listening to the OST of Donkey Kong Country 3 for the SNES, and I remembered an experience I had with it when I was younger.
There are a couple of water levels in that game. They're a tangled mess of brightly-coloured coral corridors, teeming with dangerous enemies like spiked urchins, hungry piranhas and salvos of swift barracudas. You can't fight these enemies for much of these levels, so you have to tread (water) carefully around them.
And while you're doing this, the track Water World is playing. Now, everyone loves Aquatic Ambience, the track that plays in DKC1's water levels, and for good reason - it's a serene, mysterious and beautiful piece of music that captures the experience of swimming through pristine waters. But Water World takes a slightly different approach - while still calming and pretty to listen to, there's this undercurrent of... dread, I want to say, that accompanies it. This disconcerting sense that you are lost, you are alone, and you should not be here. As pretty as this world is, it is not yours to exist in. There are aspects to it that are fundamentally unknowable to surface dwellers. And if you were to perish, that world would swallow you up in an instant. No-one would mourn you down here.
And then, AND THEN, you get to the end of the level, and you emerge in this small cavern. Because of how DKC3's levels work, you have to be on dry land to grab the flagpole and clear the stage, so from that perspective it makes sense. But tiny babby me did not see it that way. Consider that for these levels, the general direction you go is right and down - as in, descending deeper beneath the surface of the ocean. So you dive right down, maybe even to the ocean floor, and here's this cave you can stand up and walk around in. This tiny little space, at the BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN, with this absolutely haunting piece of music playing the entire time, and just for a moment you go, "Why did I come here? How do I get out?" and then it occurs to you that you don't know why or how, and that maybe, since the game has guided you down here, this is where you're supposed to be. In a small cave, at the bottom of the ocean. Forever.
And then you grab the goal flag and you move to the next level.
But let me tell you something - that entire sequence MESSED ME UP as a kid. As terrifying as the notion was, it was also strangely beautiful to me, in a way that I couldn't explain then, and still can't quite explain now. I genuinely believe that experience has likely shaped a good deal of what I enjoy in certain media - things like a sense of futilty, of small secret places you want to enter knowing you can never leave, of leaving this world entirely for something smaller, safer.
I'll show you what I mean, a bit later on. Watch this space, ok?
