“This game is janky, unpredictable, thoroughly imperfect, and I love it”

Feeling horror at what I have wrought in CREATURE CREATOR

CREATURE CREATOR IS A REAL MONKEY’S PAW OF WISH FULFILMENT

Spore is one of those games I’ve been long curious about, but never got around to playing. I know enough, however, to recognise that this is basically a Poundland version of it. Well, not even Poundland; it costs a grand total of 79p. As a result, this might be the only game I’ve ever played where I would have been happy to have paid five times the asking price.

This game is janky, unpredictable, thoroughly imperfect, and I love it. It’s a bundle of contradictions. There are dozens of little touches that I adore. The way that the screen is black and white until you place eyes on your creature; the fact that one of the maps (a literal sandbox) has multiple footballs, two huge buckets for goals, and a working scoreboard; the fact that, although it’s a zerobudget endeavor, you can meet and chat with fellow creators online. Making and testing something, though, is an exercise in equal parts frustration and hilarity.

It’s wonderful and smooth in theory. Creation is user-friendly for the most part. Basically, you stretch out and shape the body, then start sticking things like legs and eyes onto it. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Whether what you make bears any resemblance to what you had planned is an entirely different story. A story with an ending that is either sad or indescribably funny depending on your perspective.

Creature Creator is a real monkey’s paw of wish fulfillment. Everything, and I mean everything, that I’ve made so far is nightmare fuel, whether I wanted it to be or not. The one I keep coming back to is my two-headed giant insect thing. I wanted it to look disturbing, and it does. Once it gets moving, however, it’s disturbing in entirely the wrong way.

What bothers me is the leg movement. I don’t know how this happened—maybe the body’s not far enough off the ground, maybe I’ve put the legs on at the wrong angle, perhaps the weight distribution is off—but whenever this thing walks, it swings its hips around in a sexually suggestive manner.

CREATE EXPECTATIONS

My tour de force is the result of my asking, “How close can I get to a human?” It’s a bipedal monstrosity that needs a new word to describe it, waddling around bow-legged as it does with a crown atop its head.

From others I’ve seen Hellraiser’s version of Sonic, some good Pokémon, and a version of Kirby that will haunt me. It’s broken, it’s glitchy as hell, and it’s endless fun.