GamesAdventureThe remake of one of the best cult classics from one of the best years in gaming just dropped, and I have become 9 years old againWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesAdventureThe remake of one of the best cult classics from one of the best years in gaming just dropped, and I have become 9 years old againWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Microids)
30 years ago, we experienced one of the best years in the history of videogames. It’s actually wild how many all-time greats landed in 1994. Genre-defining—heck even genre-creating—classics were just being flung at our heads with wild abandon.
X-COM, Warcraft, Doom 2, TIE Fighter, Super Metroid, EarthBound, Final Fantasy 6, System Shock, Wing Commander 3, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, Master of Magic, Theme Park, Beneath a Steel Sky, Tekken—and this is just a taste of what we were playing three decades ago.
But for 9-year-old Fraser, who had very limited spending money, it was all about one game: the peculiar French action-adventure romp, Little Big Adventure. This oddity, which put you in the slippers of a fugitive with a magical ball and a penchant for comfy, flowing robes became an obsession for me: particularly because it was pretty damn tricky, but also because it was absurdly ambitious—a free-roaming journey full of fatal conundrums, non-linear quests and a world that, to my under-developed brain, seemed endless.
The remake,Little Big Adventure – Twinsen’s Quest, is out today, and I am experiencing a nostalgia overdose. It has changed quite a bit, from the art direction, which makes the world a bit more exaggerated and cartoonishly colourful, right down to the mechanics, but so much of what enchanted me the first time around perseveres—just with less of the stuff that frustrated me.
LBA veterans might remember the stance system, where you’d need to switch stances to run, fight and sneak. It seemed clever at the time, for reasons I can’t quite remember, but in truth it was a mega faff. As a kid, I died so many times because I panicked while trying to switch from the neutral stance to the aggressive one, only to get a kicking from an angry, anthropomorphic elephant cop. Well, that’s all gone. Now it’s all handled like any other game, and you have access to all of your actions without the need to switch.
Strangely, though, sneaking has been tossed out entirely. Instead, you can hide only in specific situations. That’s not to say there isn’t an element of stealth: one of the first things you do, when breaking out of an asylum at the start of the game, is don a nurse’s uniform to get past some guards.
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Some of the dissatisfaction with the game’s new look might stem from the fact that LBA was actually a pretty dark adventure at times, despite being seemingly aimed at kids. You effectively become a prophet/terrorist, attempting to end the reign of a megalomaniacal scientist and his fascist regime. But LBA has always been a dichotomy, flitting between whimsical and mature, playful puzzle-solving and beating up clone cops.
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