TOKYO — A boy has been kidnapped and taken to the moon by a tyrant king, who is trapping the souls of children in wooden puppets in order to turn them into slaves. The boy learns from a witch in a castle that if he wants his soul back he’ll need to steal a pair of enchanted scissors, which he succeeds in acquiring with the help of a talking, flying cat and in doing so begins a very peculiar adventure.
[partner id=”wireduk”]This is the premise of Sony’s early 2013 PlayStation 3 game, Puppeteer — a surreal platformer that draws significant influence from classic 2-D titles such as Sega’s 1994 pantomime-on-a-drugtrip classic Dynamite Headdy and more recent fantasies such as Peter Molyneux’s Fable series.
I visited Sony’s Japanese development studios in Tokyo’s Shinagawa district to get the first hands-on with Puppeteer the company has allowed in its three-year development period. In short: It’s mad, fun, and damn hard to explain to a reader. In fact, after meeting Gavin Moore, Puppeteer ‘s game and art director, it turns out that was one of the game’s biggest development challenges.
“I’d walk into a room full of marketing guys from different regions of the world and say, ‘This is Puppeteer ‘ and they’d look at you with blank faces,” says Moore. “But show them some gameplay footage and they’d love it, but they wouldn’t know why they love it.”
You’ll clamber over colorful household obstacles such as pots and pans, jump to avoid oncoming rats and boulders, and collect shimmering golden gems to earn extra lives. Characteristically it pays homage to tropes of 2-D platform gaming now all but lost to 3-D visuals, quick-time events and buildings that collapse with real-world physics — something Moore explained was entirely deliberate.
“I’m a really big fan of old platformers,” said Moore. “I wanted to make a game that gamers and non-gamers would love.”
But there’s a twist: “Basically, I’m making this game for my [eight-year-old] son. I found that [he] was playing games and would get bored very quickly. He’d say, ‘Oh we’re playing the same thing in the same area again,’ then he’d put the controller down and go outside.
“It had to be a game that changed all the time, and it had to surprise him. In the theater setting, we’re changing the background all the time — every five or 10 minutes.”
As a result, no scene or setting is reused and the game’s design team had to construct elaborate environments that would only be seen by the player once. “They’d spend hours making things and I say, ‘Yeah, that looks awesome’, and you see it for five seconds,” Moore said, “which they hate. They go, ‘Oh we can use it there, too?” and I say, ‘No, make something completely new.'”
The game plays out a dark fairytale, inspired by Moore’s love of Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. A cast of English actors voice and narrate the game’s fantasy characters and storyline with copious helpings of Monty Python-like humor and pantomime slapstick.
However, despite Moore’s desire to avoid modern game archetypes in favour of the old, I saw at least one boss battle that involved slow motion quick-time events — a very current-generation tactic to make sure gameplay blends favorably with cinematic sequences. Clearly modern design sensibilities haven’t been entirely vanquished from Sony’s studio.
