New platformer Paperklay is a little bit Banjo, a little bit LittleBigPlanet
Out this month
3D platformer Paperklay has perhaps the least appealing protagonists I've seen in a game recently. I hate avian buddy duo "Chick & Nugget" and all their works, beginning with the ghastly 3am pun that appears to have spawned them.
Look at that ampersand, dangling in the middle like a chunk of gristle. What an absolute crime against typography. And chickens. And platform game levels made of paper and card - you'd never put an actual chicken nugget on dioramas like these, the grease would ruin it. I also mistrust Chick's beady black eyes, and I can't abide the fact that Nugget is wearing a fragment of eggshell for pants. That's like a human child using a placenta as a necktie! Argh!
Anyway, none of that matters, because Paperklay looks to be an absorbing arts-and-crafty experience with large, transforming environments. It's got music from Banjo-Kazooie and Yooka-Laylee composer Grant Kirkhope and Moonlighter composer Steven Melin. Banjo is definitely the right parallel here. Trailer, away!
The game launches on 27th May, and still has a demo on Steam. You can expect a familiar buffet of platforming moves - double-jumping, dashing, gliding and sprinting - plus platform puzzles that involve folding, unfolding and variously messing with the layout. There are solutions that, as in Fez, rotate the entire landmass you're traversing, exposing new routes. Developer Kevin Andersson has been working on the thing for a tidy three years, documenting the development on his Youtube channel. The latest press release estimates that the full game will last five to six hours.
Aside from upsetting me with its puns, Paperklay also reminds me that a lot of games now trade on fancy, tactile recreations of physical materials. Lumino City, for example, or Hirogami, or Paper Trail, or The Midnight Walk from just this morning.
All these gameworlds are exquisitely made - every object creased and cut and stamped and embroidered to perfection by the unseen hands of godly artisans. I think there's an opportunity here for an arts-and-crafts experience in which the world has been sellotaped and glued together by people with no artistic talent whatsoever. At school, I once tried to make a papier-mache sculpture of a majestic valley. When I came back the next morning, it had shucked off its wire support and curled in on itself like a dead cockroach. Give me a platform level set inside that.