PSP games - not just dull PS2 ports

Beit Hell has a very acid sense of humour. Take, for example, the first job, where you have put caps on pens. Sometimes the pens are the right way up. Sometimes they are not. Video game veterans will quickly note the absolutely massive score meter that runs along the bottom of the screen: it represents the trillions of pens to come. So you keep playing, seeing how fast you can go, whether mistakes matter. 'Surely', the gamer inside you reasons, 'Something will happen: it’s a game. I’m going to trigger some kind of progression. Maybe some enemies will appear, or a power up, or an end of level boss or two.'

Nope.

Occasionally the lights flicker. Your co-workers mutter in the background. And… that’s it! So, just like in real life, take the money and run: get a new job. The next one I tried involved dropping a spike between your spread fingers. It’s just like Bishop does in Aliens, only in Beit Hell you’re a bored student. Or sometimes, inexplicably, a giant lizard. This is Japan, after all. Presumably Godzilla’s son goes to school and gets bored exactly like the rest of the kids. It’s game over when you impale your own hand, which, thanks partly to design and partly to the clipping of the spike model, looks incredibly painful.

A knowledge of gaming’s history suffuses Beit Hell: there’s ‘Kinoko or Die’, where you pick mushrooms on a motorway that plays exactly like Frogger; a job where you pick up balls from the golf course, to the background tune from Everybody’s Golf, and a job where you have to stop a Mario look-a-like from driving off a cliff in his go-kart. It’s not surprising Beit Hell is so full of gaming references, given how conscious the Japanese are of gaming history. Retro games are a much bigger market over there than in the west: incredible shops like the superbly named Super Potato are crammed full of lovingly preserved retro games, making it easy to brush up on your gaming history (for a tour of Super Potato, check out this link.)

Beit Hell’s love of gaming runs deeper than just sly nods to gaming greats though. There’s one job where an old woman gives you wood to chop, but she also occasionally throws in a cuddly toy and if you chop that, it’s game over. The game is basically a battle between your brain and you’re the nerve that runs down to your thumb. The feeling and the challenge is instantly familiar: it’s the purest distillation of the twitch-reaction that’s at the heart of every game, from sniping in an FPS to jumping in a platformer.

Beit Hell’s smart use of gaming history marks it out as something compellingly different to the PSP’s usual fodder of re-hashes and ports. It lacks the focus-group gloss of modern titles and has an authenticity and strangeness to it that makes it weirdly addictive.

However, that's not all...