Format: Flash
Developer: William David
www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/507259 

I’m pretty sure that somewhere within Walter Benjamin’s terrifyingly vast Arcades Project, there are a few words about turtles, and the role the sleepy ancients played in the formation of one of the last century’s more influential cultural movements. At a specific point, I think, around the low 1900s, it became quite the thing in fashionable European circles to not just own one of the strange, homely beasts, but treat it to evening walks too, out on the boulevards and byways of the continent’s sparkling cities, its sinewy neck safely clinched within a leash (presumably to ward against an uncharacteristic burst of energy which would see your expensive pet zipping away into steadily multiplying congregations of urban traffic). Taking a turtle for a stroll enforces, amongst other things, a certain kind of speed: it locks you into the reflective amble that helped draw together the early strands of Modernism.

Pace is sometimes important for art, then, and it’s still important for games, instantly separating the intents of nippy blasters like Quake and Borderlands from more strategic plods such as Splinter Cell or SWAT 4, before you’ve even triggered your first block of tutorial text. In Leaving, the relatively slow tempo is joined by another stylistic tic – you can’t turn back on yourself, even though there’s a key mapped for that very purpose. Taken as a whole, it makes a lot of sense, though: this is a game about decisions made, and paths chosen, and was pieced together by Ubisoft staffer William David, on the eve of quitting the company and striking out on his own as an independent developer. At the start of next year, if you find yourself playing through one of the publisher’s big budget titles, and you zero in on a feature that could have done with five or six hours of extra polish, blame David – he was probably working on this instead.

He’s not the first designer to take his leave with a game – by the end of this year, kicking off with a chic spray of pixel art will probably be something of a cynical tradition, combining both parting gift and calling card in one package – but Leaving is stylish and quietly lovely, capturing the mix of trepidation and excitement that characterises the big decisions in life. A jazz-infused night-time scene, with a personal treasure map spooling out across the stars, David’s game follows a blocky orange character making his way through crowds of people – possibly co-workers, possibly reasoning voices in his head – as he prepares to take the big leap and give up his job. With his head down in a determined, hunched-forward slog, on the few occasions I’ve played through Leaving, he takes the leap twice, the first time transporting himself back to the beginning of the level again, echoing the dry-runs people tend to go through as they talk themselves around and around in circles over something.

It’s barely a game, really: more of a faintly interactive family circular. Its hard to see online leaderboards for Leaving being particularly exciting spaces. Regardless of that, there’s an easy appeal to the piece, partly due to the breezy hand-made style of the whole thing, partly due to that flutter or recognition you get, having fumbled your way through crucial choices in your own life, and partly, for me at least, due to the ever-satisfying sense of looking through someone else’s mail, as the short experience terminates in a brief splurge of thank-yous to David’s friends and allies.

There’s a million reasons why David might want to strike out on his own, but it seems thematically fitting that he’s parting ways with a company like Ubisoft, a firm with several forthcoming titles in progress that have development teams numbered in the hundreds. Leaving, above all else, reminds you that games are made by individuals: even if the challenge that set David moving wasn’t self-expression, then, the challenge for Ubisoft and the other giants like it increasingly is. The big players these days don’t just have to create a means of working on vast, ambitious projects that give each and every team-member enough of a sense of purpose to keep them happy in their job – now, they also have to ensure that the finished product somehow retains that vital sense of the personal touch as well.