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

Part II: One Ring to Rule Them All (Marble Zone)

The next stop on our tour is the Marble Zone, which takes us from the bright sunshine of Green Hill to the ruins of some ancient civilization, once proud and respected, now a crumbling relic, a shell of its former self. And what appears to have ruined it is a volcanic eruption, judging by all the lava the place is riddled with. If you close your eyes, does it almost feel like you’ve been here before?

The lava is quite interesting though, because unlike those spike pits in the Green Hill Zone, you are granted those seconds of temporary invincibility if you fall into it. So when you come to a large pool of lava that must be traversed, there are two ways to go about it. The one that is presumably intended is to push a block of stone into the lava and ride it across as it floats merrily downstream. Alternately, you can jump straight into the lava, use that temporary invincibility to collect the rings you lost, and keep on collecting them every time your invincibility runs out until you’ve made it across.

See, unlike other games, Sonic doesn’t have a health bar that is gradually depleted each time you take a hit until it runs out and you die. Instead, it has the power rings, which serve double duty as collectibles akin to the coins in Mario and as your health mechanic. Each time you take a hit, all the rings you have collected come flying out, and you’re left to frantically scramble around trying to grab them all again. It’s never possible to regain more than about half of what you started out with, which means that when you pull stunts like running across a lava lake, you soon find yourself down to a single ring, but crucially, it’s always possible to keep hold of that last one.

So you can keep losing it and grabbing it, over and over, clinging to life through sheer stubbornness. All of what you had, all of your former glory long since gone, you desperately cling to that last fragment, that last piece of hope that one day you’ll reach the end of this lava and walk on solid ground again. One day the misery will end, one day you’ll claw back some semblance of the life you used to have, and the people will love you again.