STORM BOY: THE GAME
No lightning; just cloud strife
When a game features a pelican called Mr Percival, you might (not unreasonably) expect it to be GOTY material. When you discover that it consists of nothing more than walking left to right and playing a handful of minigames, however, your expectations are likely to change.
An adaptation of the 1964 children’s book by Colin Thiele, Storm Boy is in principle a wonderful idea. You, controlling the titular bad-weather boy, cause paragraphs from the book to appear on-screen when he hits certain trigger points in the environment. There are optional minigames1 along the way to keep young minds engaged. It’s a great concept, but the execution is terrible.
Each book extract disappears from the screen when your character moves too far out of an invisible box, meaning you must literally stop and read. This, however, is the least of the game’s problems. The biggest, which causes lots of other little issues, is that the book is enormously, and bafflingly, abridged here. Storm Boy is a very short book, yet huge chunks are missing from this interactive adaptation. As a result, it’s possible – likely, even – that most people will thunder through the entire thing in 20 minutes or less. 2 This is not an exaggeration.
Even worse, the text has been edited in such a way that the final result is sanitised, purged of anything with even a remote chance of upsetting little kiddywinkles, with one unavoidable exception. Some things are poorly explained, and the ending is changed significantly by omission and visual misrepresentation. It’s a shame but, even at a penny shy of five quid, this is hard to recommend. Luke Kemp