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Review

The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom

8.0

Format Xbox Live Arcade

Developer Unknown

Publisher Unknown

Genre Unknown

24-Feb-2010 Finally, we find out who ate all the pies

1 Comments

In the games industry, imitation is rarely flattery and it's not often sincere either. Usually, it's an attempt to squeeze a bucketful of cash out of someone else's ideas. And so we arrive at The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom, which reveals itself, almost immediately, to be a total rip-off of Braid's brand of time-twisting platform-based puzzling.

The thing is, even though this is a shameless attempt to ride on the coat-tails of one of our favourite XBLA games, we're finding it difficult to hate Winterbottom and his pie-scoffing quest.

For a start, the game looks gorgeous. The backgrounds are often riddled with clockwork mechanics and there's a silent movie-inspired flickering monochrome celluloid effect throughout.

Beautifully silly rhyming title cards carry the story along, and the entire plot centres around Winterbottom travelling through time in order to cram as many pies as possible into his moustache-adorned gob. It's brilliantly bonkers and perfectly charming.

It also turns out that if you copy a good game and do it well, you end up with another good game. The mechanics of Winterbottom are slightly different from Braid, relying more on creating clones that allow you to be in two or more places at once. By and large, though, it's a similar, satisfying struggle to bend your mind around dividing a challenge into smaller parts and playing them through in sequence.

While Winterbottom inherits many of the positive aspects of Braid, it also suffers from some of the same problems. Occasionally, the warm glow associated with sussing out what you need to do to solve a tricky puzzle turns to ice when you're harpooned by a fiddly bit of timing and spend several attempts smashing your head against it. Much of the game relies on recording a clone and then interacting with it, and if your timing is even slightly off you can make life very difficult for yourself.

This may not be the most original game on the planet, but it's still well worth a look. If you've cracked Braid, this will scratch an identical itch. It's an adventure it would be a real shame to miss.

Mike Channell