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“Remember that? Fun? That thing we used to have before gaming felt like a second job?” Enter the refreshing title of…
At its core, a good platformer is about getting to places. Not going to places or being in places, but getting to places. You can make the world pretty, you can make the world big and you can riddle the world with secrets but if getting to any of those things isn’t fun, then your platformer will fail. You see, the collectibles, world and settings were all just excuses for you to use the in-game mechanics in fun ways to get from point A to point B. Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers was a breath of fresh air that reminded me of what it felt like to play a game that remembered this.
T&B:GL is a game about pushing, pulling, shoving and otherwise moving objects around the world in order to either get from point A to B, or in some cases to bring point B to point A. The basics of the game involve three tools. First is a grappling hook that you can use to pull objects by shooting it out to latch onto them. Second is a rocket gun which lets you attach rockets to objects to blast them off in the direction that they face. Last, and probably the most creative, is a laser, which can cut nearly every object in your environment to pieces.
Aside from the basic ability to jump and push objects, this takes platforming to a rather unexplored level for me. “Platforming” is no longer so much about moving your avatar from one point to another but figuring out how to move, cut and dice one point or another to suit your avatar. I’ve made it no secret that I hate puzzle/physics game. Well, this is technically a puzzle physics game that I love and here’s why. Freedom. The biggest reason I hate puzzle games is because they stifle creativity. They often force you to solve a problem by simply selecting a series of pre-determined inputs in order to receive the required output. T&B:GL says, “Hey. Hey you. Here’s a playground. There are little secrets hidden all around. Go find as many as you want. Oh, and you have a laser and everything is destructible. Don’t blame us if you push the wrong thing off a ledge or pull a cliff on your head. Otherwise, have a blast.”
I remember buying this game thinking “hey this looks like harmless fun,” and I can’t say that I’m disappointed. You’re not saving the world, you’re not fighting off hordes of baddies and you’re not collecting 100 tokens of collect-i-ness in every level. What you are doing however is having fun figuring out how to get from one point to another in a a gimmickless playground, often for no other reason than because it was fun to see if you could.
As far as I can tell, the game is all about getting a pair of pants back that someone stole from you. Don’t give me that look, that seems to be the case. Otherwise, I have no idea who Grandpa is or how his leftovers fit into the mix. It doesn’t really matter though because as long as I can grapple, rocket and zap my way creatively through each level, the lightweight Tier 1 fun will flow on. It’s been such a long time since a platforming game captivated my interests. This one certainly does.
