![]() ![]() While Papetura’s story is simple, the way it’s told is done artfully thanks to a complete lack of dialogue. In order to escape and save the world, they will have to harness the power of light and learn how to navigate the treacherous world ahead of them. But can the game stand up alongside its peers like Machinarium?Ī little paper creature awakens in a dark prison. It’s a massive undertaking that apparently took the developer years to accomplish. Everything in the game is literally handcrafted from paper and animated digitally to create a world that, frankly, needs to be seen to be believed. Papetura by Polish developer Petums is another story entirely. Maybe not the most elegant term in this case, but understandable enough. Numerous Steam pages proudly announce their “handcrafted levels” to distinguish them from the abundance of procedurally-generated fare. ![]() Tux and Fanny is unique and gorgeous: a strange treasure.“Handcrafted” is a buzzword that gets passed around the indie scene a lot these days. We categorise birds, paint and sell pictures on the internet, float down a river on a tyre and shatter the fabric of reality and paste it back together. While we might find the pump for the football early enough in the long and surprising afternoon we are playing through, we find many other incredible things. The stranger parts of the game are sometimes the most poignant: the narrative journey of the flea on the cat’s back is quite moving, for example, which caught me off guard. It feels very personal, which tempers the surrealism and grounds what is a weird experience. Tux and Fanny began as a long series of tiny films by director and writer Albert Birney. Sometimes it is animated in watercolour, sometimes computer-generated, sometimes it is stop-motion, sometimes it is all of those things at once. Sometimes it is a simple, blocky pixelated world. The visual style is noteworthy – it changes often, depending on which of the many queries we as players are trying to solve. These micro-games have silly names such as Skull Legs and Puzzle Tractor, but they are purposeful and even occasionally poetic in their execution. There is a plethora of micro-games, found on floppy disks around the house and garden, which you can play on the desktop computer in the living room. Some puzzles contain whole worlds of their own: an entire readable copy of Moby-Dick is hidden on the shelf, as are many tiny comics and zines that are a joy to browse through. The player wanders around as Tux, Fanny, the cat or the flea that lives on the cat’s back, and even the rewards for your problem-solving have a dreamlike feel to them. To categorise this as a point-and-click adventure, or an exploration game, or a puzzle game feels wrong, though it incorporates elements of all three genres while subverting them at every turn. There is a door in the wall where there shouldn’t be and strange figures are coming through. ![]() There is a tree growing up through the floor. ![]() Can we find a pump? This first challenge is the route towards hundreds of other tiny mysteries in the labyrinthine world of Tux and Fanny’s house and surrounding gardens, each stranger and more delightful than the last. Our quest is simple – find a way to reinflate the football. Our two oddly named protagonists decide that they would like to play a game of football, but disaster strikes: the ball is flat. Like many great adventures, Tux and Fanny begins on a quiet afternoon. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |