Puppeteer is absolutely one of the titles I’m most excited about right now. A platformer with puzzle elements, it’s presented as a theatrical production, so sets change around the player in a very mechanical way, and spotlights follow the cast across the stage. It’s a great framing device and complemented by a dark, whimsical sense of humour, and gameplay that’s not about complexity, but secrets and surprises.
Protagonist Kutaro can swap his head on the fly, and each of the hundred-odd heads in the game has a specific use. A short way into the adventure he also nabs a pair of magical scissors, and can use them to almost swim around the screen provided he has something to cut. Oh, and let’s not forget the magical floating cat you guide with the right stick. No, really. And if you’re playing co-op, the second player controls the cat.
Puppeteer has all the makings of a classic, but what’s the origin story for its interesting amalgamation of elements? “I went to Bunraku, which is Japanese puppet theatre,” Gavin Moore, Art Director, SCE Worldwide Studios, tells us, “and I’m sitting in this great Kabuki theatre, watching these three guys in black control these really lifelike puppets. It’s all in ancient Japanese, so I can’t understand a word of what’s going on, but [am] totally in love with it. And then I suddenly realised that all the sets are changing behind the actors; they’re kind of sliding in and sliding out and rotating… as the play’s going on.
“So we left the theatre and went to a bar,” he continues, “and I just went ‘oh my god, that’s the idea – that’s what it is. I need to make this [game] theatre.’ Because if I have this theatre [setting] then I can make a world where the player doesn’t move through the world like an ordinary game, the whole world will move around you. So I can then change that world every five to ten minutes, without even letting the player know it’s going to happen. And what that’s going to do, is it’s going to keep the player there playing my game because they’ll want to see what’s coming next.” The resulting story was created in both Japanese and English: the product of Moore and a Japanese writer “bouncing two cultures together.”
“It’s a dark fairy tale,” Moore says, “much in the line of Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam – who I love, but I love Monty Python too, so there’s going to be a lot of strange stuff in the game for you to find and see too.”
Drop-in drop-out co-op lets the second player control Kutaro's companion.
What kind of strange stuff? “In our story, our poor hero is spirited away to the moon, and his head is pulled off and eaten by the Moon Bear King. His soul’s been stuffed into a wooden puppet, his head’s been pulled off and eaten, and he’s thrown away, discarded.”
Kutaro’s given a second chance through an unlikely source, a “grouchy, psychopathic witch and her lazy flying cat,” who sends him on a quest to recover a pair of magical scissors, with which she hopes to take over the moon. But first, he needs a new head. It’s a smart system: Kutaro’s heads act as his lives. He can have three in the bank at once, but even if the head he’s wearing is knocked off, he has a few seconds to pick it back up.
“Those heads - and there are a hundred of them hidden in the game to find,” Moore tells us, “each has one individual ability that can be used in the game. That might help you in a boss battle or help you find a secret bonus stage, or unlock different characters etc. that you might not normally find. But then there are four hero heads as well. There were four heroes that rose up against the Moon Bear King, but obviously in my story they were pathetic; they basically lost the battle almost immediately and had their heads pulled off and thrown across the moon, and you find those on your adventure too. The difference between your life heads and the hero heads is that once you get them, they’re assigned to buttons and you can’t lose them. You can use them at any time.”
Each of the hero heads has an attack, but its ability also ties into other gameplay elements. “The wrestler power, for instance,” says Moore, “he’s strong, so that means he can move the set, physically, and [you can] solve puzzles with him. Then with the bomb, [the power of the Moon Ninja], I can blow objects up and smoke will rise up which I can then cut up and get to places I couldn’t normally get to, so you have to use them in conjunction. You get the first one in Act 1 and the last one in Act 4, and then you have to use them all in Acts 5, 6 and 7. Even though it’s a three act play I wrote it in seven acts because I couldn’t shut up.”
Granny slam... it'd be harsh if she wasn't such a b**ch.
It’s a smartly crafted set of gameplay mechanics, but chances are when you start playing Puppeteer you’ll be too blown away by the incredible presentation to think too much about gameplay. Speaking to Moore, the game’s vibrant look has clearly been a labour of love. “Variety is everything in Puppeteer,” he says, “and if I’m changing the set every five to ten minutes, that means that my staff has to make everything new. The rule was - you can’t use the same model and you can’t use the same animation, so they hate me, but it’s a great bonus for players.
“What it did give us was a craftsmanship feel to the game, because you didn’t feel that anything was being simulated in any way. Everything’s done by hand in this game. We wrote everything ourselves – it’s our own rendering engine, our own particle engine, we have our own cloth simulator in there etc etc, but if anything moves in the game it’s all hand made. Nothing was scanned, nothing was taken from photographs, it’s all hand drawn and done on its own. Every single character. I have over 500 images on my desk. I have a stack of paper. You wouldn’t believe the amount of trees I’ve killed.”
Puppeteer is out on September 10 in North America, and September 11 in the UK and Australia.
Cam Shea is the Senior Editor at IGN Australia. Click these links and hit follow so we can be friends! Twitter | IGN | Facebook
Source : ign[dot]com
No comments:
Post a Comment