Hands On: Cloudberry Kingdom

I’ve had to do a little digging to learn more about Cloudberry Kingdom, a game I had no idea existed before I sat down with it a couple of days ago. It turns out this was a Kickstarter project which just about snuck past its target, promising procedurally generated platforming for all difficulties. Since then a lot has changed, and Ubisoft have stepped in to help Pwnee Studio realise a full release on all the major platforms.

The procedural generation is an intriguing core idea to the game, and one I had no idea about when I first got my hands on it. All I knew was that I could customise my character to be practically anything I wanted it to be. The standard bald-head, green jumpsuit and cape of the canonical pseudo-hero named Bob; a floating brain; a moustachioed toff or whatever else I could think of. You can even just hit a button and get a randomised outfit if you don’t want to create something manually.

Procedural generation brings with it crazy sideways chained spikey balls.

The story mode opens with a wonderfully animated paper-craft cinematic which paints our rather washed up hero in a somewhat less-than-fantastic light. Yes, there’s a princess, but he’s really not all that fussed about rescuing her. It’s more that he really wants to beat his arch-nemesis Kobbler once and for all, although Kobbler doesn’t seem to pop up after that opening cutscene anyway.

The thin plot out of the way, it’s time to work your way through a few hundred precreated levels. You have the classic task of any platformer: get from the entrance on the left to the exit on the right, and collect as many of the floating diamonds as you can along the way.

It all starts off simply enough, with a few platforms and simple jumps to make, the diamonds on nice arcs which are easy to collect through the 10-20 second long level. Then moving platforms come along, as well as retractable spikes. Next up are single hit bugs, followed by spinning lines of fire, swinging spiked blocks and a spiked wall which chases you from one side to the other.

Each of these elements adds on top of the others, much like other platformers, but every 10 levels or so the rules change on you, and your hero is given a new power to deal with. While it could be a double jump or a jet pack, there’s also the possibility that you’ll be strapped to a wheel or forced to jump around in a box. The handling changes, the levels ahead of you adapt, and you’re suddenly looking at a very different kind of platforming.

This level might take a few tries…

After brushing through 50-odd levels, I skipped ahead from the first chapter to the seventh and final world, ominously called The Masochist. Load it up and you’ll see why right away. Dragons leap up from the bottom of the screen attacking tiny platforms, each of which has the tiniest of safe areas lasting just a fraction of a second before you must make your next leap.

It’s an utterly insane level, but there is always a way through in this game, with tiny twitches of the stick to regulate your speed and timing the double jump just right. You’ll have to rely on trial and error to get there, but it’s doable, as long as you’re ready to move immediately, and have a little luck on your side.

The game supports up to four players, and the absolute highlight for me was sitting down with a buddy and going through the Arcade made. It’s a more co-operative than competitive experience, with the diamonds you both collect counting towards a combined score and working together to get to the end of the stage. If either of you succeeds, you’re on to the next level of quick-fire platforming.

Out of the Escalation, Time Crisis, Hero Rush and Hybrid Rush modes it was the latter which had us laughing the most. Escalation simply sees levels get harder and harder, while Time Crisis needs you to pick up diamonds to add to the clock. Hero Rush sees you switching powers each level, with a nice icon over the exit to show what’s coming next, but with Hybrid Rush, powers are combined. You might find yourself on a wheel with jet packs or have a double jump while constantly shifting in size, or in a box with double jump… and jet packs.

It’s fantastically silly and, thanks to the procedurally generated levels, everything always felt possible to complete right up until it wasn’t, no matter how crazy the combinations got. There is also a mode called Freeplay which lets you mess about with the algorithm that generates the levels, meaning you could set yourself a crazily tricky level purely made up of spikes if you felt like it.

This game really caught me out when I actually sat down to play it. Underneath that polished veneer is a number crunching monster which can endlessly spew out levels for you to play. Really, really addictive and endlessly tricky levels. That’s both scary and awesome.

Cloudberry Kingdom is set to release on PSN, XBLA, Vita, Wii U, PC and Mac in the summer of 2013.