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jp's Paper Beast (PS4)

[July 17, 2023 06:45:48 PM]

Finished this mostly because I knew it was short so I thought, what the hell, might as well see it through to the end. Was it good/fun? I don't know...which probably leads me to lean more to the "eh, not so fun/interesting". BUT, there was some cool stuff that I did enjoy.

I did play in PSVR!

So, the game is essentially a simple puzzle game - movement is teleportation (which worked really well) and most of the puzzles are physics-based in a sense. Your basic interactions are to teleport somewhere or to pick something up with a sort of tether you have. It ends up looking like a fishing line - and you can only grab stuff that's pretty light. Lots of things you can nab - but then can't move.

In each area you have to figure out how to make progress to the next area - and this often involves using the animals in an area (to do some of the work for you) or objects in the area (often in combination with the animals).

The animal designs are all super cool and pretty - they're made out of paper but not in the origami sense nor in the "the material is paper", hard to describe - they're all pretty abstract - sort of like skeletons with adornments really, made of strips of paper, tubes, and such. BUT, not craft-paper (like in Tearaway), but real paper. There should be screenshots online...

Some of the beasts are neat - and your use of them is interesting as well - for example there's a weird worm that eats sand on one end, and poops it out the other - so you can use it do remove a sand barrier that's in your way or fill up an area with sand. There's a freezing cube, a melting cube, a sticky plant you can use to tether to objects to each other (animals in my case), and so on.

What was most fun for me was messing around with the "terraforming" interactions - dumping sand in areas, getting water to flow to others, etc. It felt quite playful and reminded me of just messing around on the beach as a kid. I had to do it to make progress - but it was enjoyable even as it wasn't "efficient", but that's just the way it is with sand and moving water, no?

The funniest animal was a turtle like creature that would get excited when next to a cube object and literally poop sand all over the place (so you have to direct it to certain areas in order to build up dunes there to direct water elsewhere). Oh, all of this in a first-person VR view.

There are some "cut-scenes" that felt a bit long, and some animation sequences as well (had to wait for a parade of paper animals to walk into a dark tunnel for what felt like a long time).

I guess I kept playing because the physics simulation parts of the game, and by that I mean the water/sand/freezing/melting terraforming aspects where fun and playful.