Tag: Arts and crafts »

LittleBigPlanet is a great game. Cut the Rope is a great game. Crafty Creatures, a charming new little puzzler from Chillingo, is pretty much LittleBigPlanet meets Cut the Rope and guess what, it’s a great game too.

In Crafty Creatures the goal is to reunite two of the titular creatures across dozens of puzzle levels. To do so, players must manipulate the handcrafted environments by breaking cardboard barriers, activating moving platforms, and rolling balls to shift weight from one tower to another. As the game progresses, more interesting quirks are added on but the puzzles remain fairly straightforward almost to a fault. However, some of the designs are so creative players won’t care how relatively easy they are. Also, skillful play earns buttons which are needed to unlock much of the game’s later content.

Besides, the gameplay itself is only half of the appeal. The art style, which looks like actual scanned-in craft items, is absolutely delightful. Stages not only feel like real, breathing worlds but worlds players would love to watch their cat roll around in. The five different chapters also have their own visual themes so players will get to see oceans, dark nights, fluffy falls and more rendered in this felt fantasy. Meanwhile, the lively, well-produced soundtrack creates a sense of cute irreverence that goes great with the stitched-together visuals.

Crafty Creatures biggest draw though is its robust creation system. Using the intuitive tools players can create a wide variety of their own remarkably distinct creatures. More importantly, they can also create their own levels and easily share them online adding a potentially infinite amount of new content into the game. If anything, watching someone else’s one-eyed, bearded cloth monster fall down an infinite hole is fun enough in its own special way.

Crafty Creatures’ aesthetic isn’t just about looking good. The creative potential of arts and crafts represents the creative potential of the game itself. That potential shouldn’t be left to go to waste.

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