#49: Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, Mega Drive, 1991)

Part VIII: TRY AGAIN (Special Stages)

One trifling little thing we missed, without which we cannot possibly achieve the true ending, cannot possibly achieve true understanding. One piece of information that turns out to be the key to unlocking the whole puzzle.

The six Chaos Emeralds are found by entering giant rings which can be unlocked on any level, so long as you complete it with at least 50 rings in your possession. Doing so grants you access to a Special Stage, a dizzying psychedelic mindscape where up is down and down is up, set against a backdrop of fish dissolving into birds dissolving into fish. As the world spins around and around, you must avoid the circles marked ‘GOAL’ at all costs and navigate your way to the centre of what appears to be an ever changing maze, though in truth, if it stopped rotating, you would see it as the straightforward corridor that it really is.

Well, it rather sounds like we’re back to the Labyrinth once more, doesn’t it? Perhaps we never truly left. But then, isn’t the acceptance of our own mortality that we learned there the vital piece of information we’re looking for? You’d never finish a level with over 50 rings acting as carelessly as we did on our initial forays into the Green Hill and the Marble Zones, after all. To exit the Labyrinth, you must retrace your steps, follow the same path you took to enter it. We’ve been going around in circles the whole time. We defined ourselves, from the beginning, by a loop.

TRY AGAIN.