Existential rhythm action game Laserlife is heading to PS4

Good day fellow video game enthusiasts. I’m Alex Neuse, Project Lead on Laserlife. I’m here today to talk to you about our latest project, which has been a long time coming.

That’s right, we finally got off our keisterbunnies and decided to make that high-concept-dead-astronaut-music-biography-game that we announced at IndieCade in 2010!

What are we dealing with here?

Laserlife is an interactive biography about a dead astronaut floating through deep space who is discovered by future intelligences who have no concept of humankind.

These deep space explorers, who we are leaving up to your imagination, have technology that is capable of extracting the physical elements of memory. As they themselves have no memory or knowledge of humanity, they extract the astronaut’s memory fragments to learn about their strange discovery.

Why is the astronaut here? Why is it alone? Why is it dead? It’s your job, representing these entities, to piece together the astronaut’s memories so that you can gain an understanding of what it is. And you do this with lasers. To the beat of the music.

What are we getting out of the experience?

In case you weren’t sure, Laserlife is the latest rhythm/music game created by the studio that brought you BIT.TRIP and CommanderVideo.

Mike Roush, the other Choice Provisions Co-Founder, and I are fascinated by what makes a human a human. What makes us whole, and are we simply the sum of our accomplishments, or are we more? While we touched on this a little in our BIT.TRIP series, the primary focus of those games was to create retro-difficult, super abstract rhythm/music games for the sake of incredible gameplay – and broken controllers. And swear words.

Our intention with Laserlife was to create a rhythm/music game that was accessible to everyone (If switched to Easy Difficulty, even my mom* should be able to complete it).

Laserlife is an experience that’s meant to be played through in one sitting. It’s an exploration, largely through symbolism, of what it means to be a human. By the end of the game, you will have unlocked several key memories of the astronaut’s life, allowing you to review their existence, as if looking at a portrait. By the end, you should feel as if you know this astronaut. And your knowing holds value in the knowing itself.

Go grab Laserlife, turn down the lights, turn up the audio, and remember what it means to be a human.

Also, feel free to poop some comments down below, and we’ll do our best to reply to each and every one; some multiple times.

*My mom actually beat BIT.TRIP BEAT. True story. I have no idea how she did that.