Vital Stats

Genre: Puzzle/Platformer

Players: 1

Online: Leaderboards

Developer: The Odd Gentlemen

Publisher: 2K Play

ESRB Rating: E

Release Date: 2/17/09

Platforms

• XBLA

Is it just me or are we witnessing the birth of a subgenre? Platformers have been around since time immeMario, but there’s been a sudden surge in recent years of time travel platformers. They all share the common mechanic of recording your actions to replay and exploit, but each game explores the concept in a different way. These games are perhaps a few years short of real staying power, but if they maintain the standards set by The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, future gamers will clamor to travel back in time to be here and now, before the genre sold out and went mainstream.

Purloin Pies Par Perfection
P.B. Winterbottom loves pie. A lot. He loves it enough to resort to pastry banditry with no regard for collateral mischief. So when P.B. carelessly sets his hometown aflame, empties its reservoir, and eventually undoes the flow of time, a demon pie sets out to teach him a lesson. It tempts him through a rift in time that allows the rapscallion to create time clones that repeat his past deeds.

You can probably already see the puzzles. TMoPBW proceeds stagewise, and each is littered with pies. P.B. must collect every last cobbler by climbing on top of his recorded doppelgangers, hurling them across rooms, and even sending them to grisly fates. In fact, it’s like the demon pie spent time temping for the ironic punishments division of Hell Incorporated.

Normally, collecting fobs feels transparent and stilted, but TMoPBW wastes no effort selling pies and punishment as a premise. The game is framed as a silent film, so every stage is bounded by black cards with rhyming couplets that tell the story, mock P.B.’s cobbler fixation, and chastise you for mistreating your time clones. The writing is so sharp and colorful that it’s easy to overlook the obvious fob trope.

said the last living clone.

In fact, the writing paints the sinister demon pie so well as it subverts your pie lust that you’ll do a double take when you see that the game is rated E. There isn’t any “mature” content to be found of course, but there’s a moral horror to your actions that doesn’t normally register outside the M rating. Kudos are in order for developer The Odd Gentlemen for casting innocent wrongness in comedy. It’s something that you don’t see outside The Maw and Edward Gorey, and it’s brilliant wherever it appears.

The art and music tie the package into a tight culinary comedy. The silent film frame gives the game a grainy monochrome look that’s both classy and hilarious, and the 3D models are rendered with such detail that they’re easily mistaken for hand drawn sprites. The music is loaded with staccato piano, clarinets, and light snare drums so that you can practically hear someone hand-cranking the movie reel in the background. TMoPBW is coherent, distinctive, and polished in its presentation. The only place it really runs into trouble is insofar as the game’s charm is driven by its novelty. It’s easy to get stumped by any puzzle game with stagewise progression, and even excellent music starts to grate after its fifth continuous loop.

Light, But Not Flaky
You’ll only be stuck when you can’t wrap your brain around Winterbottom’s temporal gymnastics, because The Odd Gentlemen clearly built this game with an eye for accessibility. The game remixes time travel as often as Braid, but also smoothly teaches you each mechanic as it arises. Once you’ve mastered recording your actions for looped replay by your paradox clones, the game easily branches mechanics from this stem. You’ll effortlessly grasp the implications of unfamiliar game concepts like time-disrupted pies that only your clones can eat, portals that anchor your recording to a single start point, and evil twins that make your recorded actions into a self-made prison.

It’s like playing team deathmatch.
Against yourself.

So without flow-disrupting issues like accessibility and awkward tropes to weigh you down, you’ll actually be free to enjoy the main game’s 51 puzzles. They’re mostly clever, and require that you think in two to three places at once. TMoPBW is especially notable because it treats death like a mechanic instead of a failure condition, and so killing your clones is just part of the lateral thinking you’ll need to adopt for success.

However, once you have found the right mindset, no puzzle is overly brain-twisting and you’ll breeze through them all in a few hours. There are another 25 or so levels you can fine tune to compete on leaderboards, but the fact remains that you can blast through TMoPBW in an evening. A brief game like this may be a problem for a value-minded gamer, but Winterbottom’s misadventures also deserve recognition for omitting any padding and producing a brisk puzzle game. There are no makework achievements, hackneyed minigames, or even a substantial hub to stand between you and time-bending puzzlement. In fact, the game is so lean that the only fat is what’s sliding down P.B.’s pie hole. It’d be unfair to call this game on being the soul of wit without admitting that it’s a good thing.

Parting Is Such Sweet Sucrose
Despite its overly complex name, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom is an accessible take on a complex idea. Time travel has never been so simply explained or elegantly controlled. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the presentation is polished and frame is novel. The game weighs in on the short side, but every moment is the sweeter for its brevity. It’s altogether too splendid for any gamer to pass up.

What It Costs: $A Sawbuck (or 800 MS points, if you prefer)

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $10 (buy)
•To The Genre Fan: $10 (buy)
•To The Casual: $10 (buy)