ARISE: A SIMPLE STORY
A pure and simple puzzle platformer?
Piccolo Studio’s first offering presents a particularly pretty puzzle platformer that we knew from the off was going to have us choking up by the end. Sure enough, we are trying our best not to shed a tear and make things awkward in the openplan office of OPM Towers when we reach its final frame. However, the path to catharsis wasn’t all roses.
You play as a bearded gentle giant jumping and climbing down memory lane. It’s no secret that this artsy adventure has mortality in mind – the game actually opens on your funeral pyre. The passing of time and memory aren’t only key to the story from there, but form a mechanical throughline as well.
You find your way through the game’s series of natural scenes by manipulating the flow of time. For example, an early level drops you into a waterlogged scene on the cusp of winter and spring. Rotating the right analogue stick one way draws out the tide, opening a path to a collectible concealed in an otherwise inaccessible shoreside cave as well as a low section of wall you can now climb. Reverse the flow of time and the tide returns, bringing with it a driftwood platform. By scrubbing through time, you can further manipulate the platform’s position, retracing its path across the water’s surface, steadily working your way towards the horizon. It’s confidently presented and implemented, with generous checkpointing encouraging you to experiment.
SMELL THE ROSES
As your journey continues, each pitstop presents pleasing recontextualisation of scrubbing through time. In one scene you manipulate the course of the sun across the sky and make platforms out of sunflower heads. In another, you freeze time and illuminate your way out of danger with a thunderclap. Later levels introduce additional elements, such as running between fires to keep the death grip of the cold at bay. These wrinkles never overshadow the central time manipulation mechanic, making for core action that never loses its focus.
As a result, there’s a minimal HUD, leaving you to soak in the stellar, Pixar-like art. Smaller details, like the thoughtful character animation and the charmingly etched collectible memory drawings, are allowed to take centre stage. The sparing use of on-screen text and spoken dialogue also keeps the emotional thread on track as it draws towards sewing a line of tacking stitches through your heart. But even as so much aligns and comes together, there are bumps in the track that threaten to derail things.
There’s no getting away from it: Arise is a 3D platformer
“YOU MOVE THROUGH THE SCENES BY MANIPULATING THE FLOW OF TIME.”
with a mostly fixed camera angle. We know. But we say ‘mostly’ because you can tilt your view slightly up or down using the left stick. However, thanks to the almost unbroken and carefully crafted camera pan that sweeps through levels, your view will quickly reset itself after you’ve made every tricky-to-judge-jump. Matters are made worse by the fact that your bearded protagonist in a bearskin cape doesn’t cling onto ledges as steadfastly as you’d like. It’s not unusual to come to a gap and attempt to jump over it only for your little beardy bro to bounce right off surfaces that very much look like ones he can grab. It never stops you for long, but it’s always just long enough to annoy. This frustration definitely taints the picture Arise is trying to paint; it doesn’t take away from the whole but it’s an unwelcome, occasionally off-key instrument in this tone poem.
Bafflingly, there’s also a twoplayer mode where you don the beard and your player two takes control of time. It’s a laid-back co-op mode in theory, but in practice it feels tacked-on and Oscar keeps trying to drown my little bearded dude. Two-player is certainly a revealing experience, though perhaps not in the way the developer intended.
Otherwise, Piccolo presents an experience that is not just impressively focussed emotionally but mechanically too. It’s a confident production from a relatively new game studio and a promising indication of what may be to come. Play on, we say.
VERDICT
A pretty picture concerned with memory and mortality that strides through its emotional beats with confidence. A 3D puzzle platformer that trips where so many others have before. Jess Kinghorn