Live Arcade Review – The Misadventures Of PB Winterbottom

We’re beginning to grow quite fond of Live Arcade sub-label 2K Play. Not content with bringing us the quite delightful man and dog act Axel and Pixel, the house has lined up this equally quaint puzzler. Described perhaps a little incorrectly as Braid with charm, Winterbottom (for short) provides an experience altogether less pretentious and more accessible than the intensely referential platformer. Which is nice.

Though this too deals with the concept of time as well as simply leaping from one platform to another, in reality things are a lot more straightforward than that. Playing the titular Mr Winterbottom amid a jovial sepia setting, players will be tasked to collect a number of delicious pies within strict time limits. He’s a naughty thief, see. Eventually, the success criteria will build to include claiming his rewards in a particular order, negotiating appearing walls and ensuring your solutions only use a certain number of clone Winterbottoms to activate switches and otherwise occupy space.. Sure enough, before too long your thought is pushed further out of the box than our original copy of Sonic 2, neurons full of consequences and other associated ones.

Our leading man’s suite of abilities has been kept mercifully curtailed, to ensure gamers don’t become swamped more by minor details than the puzzles at hand. Each episode comes framed by self-referential Dr Suess style poetry, albeit with a little less green eggs and ham. Like other puzzle titles of this nature, stages of brain bending intensity are likely to pop up at the most inopportune moments to frustrate beyond measure, though only the surliest of malcontents would declare this the moment things turn sour.

Though potentially just a little short-lived then, it’s difficult not to recommend a title that manages to back up a distinctive aural and visual hook with gameplay that isn’t either disappearing up its own backside or bizarre and ethereal. Because there’s nothing worse than having a battle of wits with a videogame – that’s just sad.