Gumboy 1.15 PerFecT Version
Gumboy Crazy Adventures is, as the name would seem to imply, very quirky. It’s the latest in the recent trend of what I’ll call alternatively controlled side-scrollers. The recent smash hit Gish has set a trend for breathing new life into the side-scrolling genre: change the way the gamer scrolls.
In Gumboy, the gamer takes control of a small creature that, frankly, I can’t categorize. He’s a ball, and he’s smooshy and resilient like a ball of gum, but is drawn so it looks as if he has a scaled and armored top. Suffice it to say, he’s unique. The gamer rolls gumboy around each level using the arrow keys and uses momentum and the angles of the level to propel gumboy through various obstacles. There is the occasional power-up to help move things along, but the basic principle is the use of speed and the environment to propel the action.
Gumboy isn’t always a ball of gum, though. In some levels (and with some power-ups), he can begin as a square or a star, changing the way he moves through the environment. In each of these forms, Gumboy can also become an air or a water version of himself. With each variant, Gumboy moves through those spaces as well as he used to do along the ground, but he must now avoid sharp outcroppings, lest he be popped.
You’re likely asking by now what exactly the point of all this rolling is. Well, the objectives in Gumboy are as nebulous, vague and intriguing as the game itself. The game as a whole has the feel of being a foreign product ported to the states. Part of that is evident in the lack of lengthy explanations in the game for the action and for some mildly broken English in the tutorial instructions. However, more than anything, I get that impression from the sense of cryptic magic that the gamer is just meant to flow with. There’s no real explanation as to what Gumboy is or why we guide him around, but part of the spirit of the game is that we shouldn’t care.
Mostly, Gumboy rolls through levels activating events by rolling into and over items and checkpoints. He seems to be doing all this as the agent of mystical creatures that dwell in the environments he travels through. A forest elf needs fairy dust collected and brought to him, a tree spirit is missing his little bean pet, etc. Gumboy, without arms or legs, transports these objects around levels by, essentially, becoming repellent. Gumboy picks up a power-up that creates a repulsing field around him. Using this field, Gumboy pushes objects around a level, and returns them to their caretakers.
Which brings me to the physics and controls in the game. Everything has a lot of bounce in Gumboy, including the protagonist himself. When Gumboy’s rolling, the game reminds me of Sonic the Hedgehog, by the way Gumboy speeds through the levels and careens off the environment. Where Gumboy runs (rolls) into problems is that it requires a fair degree of precision inside of a control scheme made to be loose. Nailing down the exact speed and angle that Gumboy needs to hit an object or bounce off a ledge can be frustrating. The game is very forgiving and the gamer will get as much time as they need to finish a task, but when a jump fails for the eighteenth time because you can’t keep Gumboy from bouncing back to the ledge he started from, you’ll think about snapping your keyboard in two. However, pushing objects around the levels is, for the most part, pretty easy. Objects will pick up the same inertia that Gumboy does as he moves around, so it’s fairly simple to propel an object ahead in the level and brute force it over tricky areas.
While the music in Gumboy isn’t really a standout, it’s largely just some light, airy tones as the gamer moves through a level, the sound effects are awfully fun. The characters that ???speak??? in the game are Gumboy and the caretakers of each area that Gumboy is running errands for. They don’t talk, though, as much as they exchange gibberish phrases. The caretakers speak long nonsense strings, whereas Gumboy himself offers only quick snippets. When things don’t go his way, he lets out a little growl. It’s all very charming.
I’ve avoided talking about the way Gumboy looks for a very specific reason: it deserves special attention. Playing Gumboy is like playing through a work of beautiful fantasy art. All of the levels have a wonderfully intricate look that feels hand-drawn. Leaves are drawn with detailing that includes their creases and cracks. Each level is simply a joy to behold and must have taken an artist a very long time to render into the game. The art alone is worth the purchase price of the title. The only negative commentary I could make would be that since Gumboy himself looks sort of crudely animated, he is very separated from the rest of the game’s art. However, this also makes him very distinguishable from the very ornate levels which tend to have a lot going on in both the foreground and background of each level. I played through frustrating areas of the game running after the carrot bait of more level it was a sizable driving force in wanting to continue playing the game.
All in all, Gumboy is an interesting, quirky and well-constructed side-scroller. The controls can be frustrating, but the rest of the game is carried off with such polish that it almost doesn’t matter at all.
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