Scarygirl

I have never read any of Nathan Jurevicius’ acclaimed graphic-novel Scarygirl, nor have I purchased any of the “designer” toys, but after playing the recent 2.5D platformer I am sorely tempted to invest; not because the game is perfect, far from it, but simply because Scarygirl is just so eye-achingly gorgeous.

The game follows the young, hook-handed Scary girl, who has been adopted by a hyper-intelligent Octopus named Blinky, as she journeys from her ramshackle treehouse, having been inspired by a mysterious bunny guru, to find the tree of knowledge and the answer to why it is losing its leaves– yeah, it is a bit of a weird one. Not that the storyline matters or effects the game much; the most revealing elements come from the narrator, who sounds like the disembodied voice from Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The first and most obvious thing to be noted about Scarygirl is its aesthetic. The whole thing looks absolutely superb; everything is stylised and fascinatingly cartoonish. The enemies are wonderfully inventive and silly and interact brilliantly with the 2.5D environment.  The animation really is fantastic. All of this is supplemented by the environments that surround Scarygirl; these are all delightfully kooky, resembling real settings while at the same time being so stylised that they reflect the imaginary nature of the game. A forest infested with giant owls and a slowly disintegrating arid mountainside filled with fire-spitting vultures are the perfect settings for Scarygirl. This all plays off the Narrator’s decidedly creepy description that introduces each new setting.

However, in opposition to the inventiveness of this game’s setting and visuals, Scarygirl’s mechanics lack the creativity that it needs to make it truly phenomenal.  The controls lack originality and are standard platformer fare – jump, heavy attack, light attack, dodge. These don’t live up to the expectations that are set up by the game’s beauty.  It would also be helpful if Scarygirl had more than one option than repeatedly wailing on her, admittedly well constructed, adversaries. The game has pretensions to having more sophisticated combat elements, including a grappling system that can be upgraded and some sort of combo element, but these are not often central to gameplay and get a bit lost when threatened by enemies. Even worse is the tutorial system; the game will often throw new elements at you and will stop the flow by pulling you into the Bunny Guru’s dojo to learn them, rather than showing how to use these skills within the game itself.

These problems are nowhere near enough to ruin the game overall though. It is simple enough to deal with the mediocre mechanics in order to experience Scarygirl’s whimsical, insane and often gloriously pretty world.