After spending over 20 minutes playing through the first level of Puppeteer, I put down my controller, jotted down a few closing notes, and quickly turned to a Sony representative to ask her why Sony isn’t talking more about the game. When we first saw Puppeteer at Gamescom in August, there was no doubt that it appeared to be a whimsical affair firmly rooted in the old-school. But after playing it, something else became clear: Puppeteer has incredible potential, and you should be excited about it.
Puppeteer puts you into the role of a young boy named Kutaro, and he's stuck in a rather unusual situation. The ruler of the Moon Realm -- the Moon Bear King -- feasts on the souls of children, and he’s got Kutaro in his sights. Escaping the grasp of the Moon Bear King (at least for now), Kutaro jets off through an array of scenes as he eludes the Moon Bear King and his minions, but he didn't escape unscathed. He lost his head in the process, something that proves rather important to the way the game plays.
The word “scenes” is important in Puppeteer, because the game’s presentation relies entirely on the game being a sort of stage show. Moving through levels isn’t as literal as it is in other side-scrolling action games; instead, scenery changes around Kutaro constantly, the stage he’s on constantly outfitted with fresh environments, enemies and objectives. And there's a crowd watching the entire time, too, applauding, oohing and ahhing and generally being enamored with Kutaro's plight.
Such a presentation – both in style and graphically – is very reminiscent of something you’d expect from a studio like Media Molecule, the Sony-owned developer behind the LittleBigPlanet series. Gorgeous graphics are complemented by a stirring soundtrack, and there’s a humorous slant to just about everything the game does. While the subject matter – children losing their souls to the Moon Bear King – could be construed as dire, Puppeteer successfully comes off far more as a fairy tale than a drama.
This is immediately evident when the game begins. As the British-voiced narrator sets the scene, he’s quickly interrupted by the Moon Bear King, who demands he spin the story to put him in a more likable light. By the time you gain control, the whimsical nature of Puppeteer beams to the fore as players switch between controlling Kutaro himself and a flying cat-like creature named Ying Yang. While Kutaro is charged with the more conventional platforming and combat elements you’d expect to find in a game like this, Ying Yang is occasionally controlled to explore the environment surrounding you by using the right analog stick.
Exploring the environment proves to be very important, because Ying Yang often finds new heads for Kutaro to wear in lieu of the one he lost. In fact, the game revolves heavily around these various heads, switching between them and utilizing the special moves each allows for. While the conventional skull head you find early on doesn’t prove to be all that useful, heads ranging from a bat to a spider are integral to your success. Unfortunately, switching between heads on the fly and activating their special powers is executed on the directional pad, which means it can’t be used for navigation. So if you want to activate the spider head’s power to draw other spiders towards you at special webs, you'll press down on the d-pad. While 2D action-platformers like Puppeteer often demand the directional pad for pinpoint accuracy and control, the left analog stick thankfully does the trick rather nicely.
The Moon Bear King and his strange pet tiger.
The dynamic of the game changes early on as well apart from swapping heads. At first, Puppeteer feels somewhat like LittleBigPlanet in that it’s not about combat, it’s solely about platforming. Eventually, this changes. First, the game begins to throw some enemies at you that you have to dodge and otherwise avoid by jumping and dodging. But after the game’s first boss encounter, Kutaro is given a pair of magical scissors (yes, magical scissors) called Calibris, and these add a unique sort of combat to the game.
Calibris doesn’t only let you attack enemies directly, slaying creatures and freeing the the children's spirits bound to them. It also allows you to interact in unique ways with the environment and with more powerful enemies that aren’t damaged by Calibris’ sharp blades. For instance, sticky, spiderweb-like tendrils can be cut by combining the scissors’ slashing abilities with jumps and dives. When fighting an enraged knight in a boss battle, the scissors can’t damage the armored foe directly, but they can cut and destroy his cloth cape, sending him hurtling to the ground in pieces.
In other words, the interplay between the skulls and Calibris quickly provide an enjoyable experience that’s heightened significantly by the game’s world, graphics and voice acting. This could be only another side-scrolling platformer in a nearly three decade history of the genre, but it isn’t. Whether the final product ends up being great, terrible or somewhere in between, you can count on getting a wholly unique experience in all phases of the game, from its presentation to its combat.
Doing some cutting with the magical scissors called Calibris.
Puppeteer – under development at Sony Japan -- is due out exclusively on PlayStation 3 sometime in 2013. The developer showing me the game refused to give a more exact time table for the game’s release, other than to reiterate that it is indeed a retail release. But he did tell me that the game is long. Very, very long for a title in the genre, in fact. He said that if you blew through the game, avoiding extra stages, collecting goods and other exploration, it’ll still take you 15 hours. But if you find bonus levels, all of the game’s heads and other collectibles and pay attention to collectible Moonsparkles (which give you an extra life for every 100 collected), you can expect to spend far more time with it than that.
So keep Puppeteer on your radars, PlayStation fans. There’s something very special about this game. There’s absolutely no doubt about it.
Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter (@notaxation) and IGN (Moriarty-IGN) and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.
Source : ign[dot]com
