Bezalel Stern
The first level of the game is easy. In the first level, you are a warrior, with a warrior’s staff. Fighting off the lizards and strange, robot-like invaders is no harder than swiping your hand left and right quickly. This will cause the staff to emit a magic wave, which will then reverberate and destroy all of your enemies.
The second level gets a little more difficult. In the second level, your staff is shrunken. It turns out it was never a real staff at all, just a piece of wood you picked up in the woods. The large ant creatures you will run into throughout this level can be killed, but not with the staff. The staff is pretty much useless. You have to use your hands, and it gets kind of disgusting. We are sorry about the difficulty.
In the third level–if you make it to the third level–you will be pretty weary. You are lost in the woods and the remains of the ant creatures are covering you pretty much entirely. Their gook is noxious, and you feel like you want to vomit. You realize this isn’t a game, right? When you get to the boss of this stage, I would suggest you just hide in the corner. There is a big rock. Hopefully, he won’t see you. Hopefully, he will get bored, and wander away. The boss is a big turtle-man who spews fire from his mouth. He is reminiscent of the evil king of the enemies in a major video game you played growing up. He wants to kill you. Hopefully, your hiding will be successful.
The fourth level consists of a rocky field. You are old and you are tired. Walking through the field takes years. It takes decades. When you are at the end of the field you are an old man. Most people, if they make it to the end of this level, simply curl up and die. The boss of this level is a feral cat. Do NOT pet the cat.
The fifth level is pretty much a wash. I would suggest running through it. At the end of the level there is a staircase. This staircase is a trap. If you take the staircase, you will evaporate, and your character will appear at the beginning of the first level of the game. Do NOT take the staircase. On second thought, doing this life over might not be a bad idea. Take the staircase. But, this time, instead of walking through the forest and slashing the lizard men with your staff, stop playing immediately. Go outside. Live. Marry the person you love. Travel. Eat strange food. Forget about the turtle man. If it doesn’t work out, there’s always the staircase at the end of level five. You can always start again.
Bezalel Stern recently completed an emerging writer fellowship at the Center for Fiction in New York and is inordinately fond of cheese. His website is BezalelStern.tumblr.com, and you can find him on Twitter at @bezalelstern.
