Guacamelee 2

Drinkbox’s surprise sequel promises to be clucking good fun

PS4

The chicken, Drinkbox co-founder

Graham Smith tells us, was a happy accident. It’s the kind of statement, said with total seriousness, that sums up the sometimes surreal nature of this job – and of videogames in general. But it’s true:

Guacamelee’s equivalent of Samus Aran’s Morph Ball wasn’t part of the plan. Then one day, a designer decided it would be good to take advantage of the studio’s tech setup, which enabled it to hook up a controller to any enemy or NPC, to do just that for a chicken. The result was silly, fun, and perfectly in keeping with the game’s offbeat sense of humour, so it stayed. For Guacamelee

2, it’s earned something of a promotion, its role expanded from a fleeting cameo to a valuable supporting role. “Now that we have more time, we’ve tried to embrace it more fully, and pushed the mechanics of the chicken farther,” Smith deadpans.

It’s just one of a (free) range of new ideas that Drinkbox has been cooking up since the release of the first game. In fact, a few had already been earmarked for the original before the studio realised it had a game to ship, and cut them. For the three years or so that the studio spent developing Severed, ideas for a potential sequel would be floated from time to time, and the studio began to compile a list of them all. As such, once Severed wrapped,

Guacamelee 2 got off to a flyer. Little wonder, then, that only a year into development, it’s already looking in healthy shape.

You couldn’t quite say the same for protagonist Juan, who, since the first game, has been enjoying the quiet life. It’s seven years later, and he now has a family, with two kids, before a mysterious event forces him to don his luchador mask once more. Smith is coy about the precise nature of the story, but temporary retirement is not a bad narrative excuse to pull the common Metroidvania trick of having a hero conveniently forget the powers they possessed in the previous game just so they can learn them anew.

You shouldn’t expect to earn too many new moves, however; having studied other sequels in the same genre, Smith is cognisant of the fact that a hero’s basic moveset rarely changes too much from game to game. No bad thing, we reckon: one of the original’s strengths was its wrestling-themed combat, and the way Juan’s grappling moves factored into traversal, with uppercuts lifting him to higher platforms and stomps crashing through floors. “We experimented with the idea of an entirely new moveset,” Smith admits. “We were really trying to keep an open mind. But we quickly found that any new mechanics we came up with for Juan’s super moves just weren’t as intuitive as those we had from the first game. So to distinguish this game from the original, we started trying to push down other avenues.”

Juan’s feathered companion is one of those avenues, of course. It was, Smith acknowledges, “pretty useless for platforming and for combat”, but that’s all changed, to the point where you can now spend “significant portions of the game” as this pint-sized flapping and fighting machine. Otherwise, it’s the world that has changed in the seven years Juan’s been away. Dimension waves allow the land of the living and the dead to share the same screen at once, prompting some tricky platforming and brawling challenges as deadly lava suddenly becomes harmless, or you race to finish off vulnerable enemies before a wave passes by and renders them immune to your attacks. There’s a gravity-flipping element Smith is reluctant to say much more about for the time being. And there are floating hook points that Juan can latch onto and leap between, in a fashion reminiscent of Ori And

The Blind Forest’s Bash ability. As with Ori – and, of course, the original

Guacamelee – you’ll have to steel yourself for a test. Even with three friends alongside you, the platforming requires careful timing, dexterity and no little patience, and with enemies scaling to match player numbers, it doesn’t get any easier as a group. Still,

Guacamelee players are unlikely to chicken out of a challenge – even if they end up playing as one.

The result was silly, fun, and perfectly in keeping with the game’s offbeat humour