Little Big Adventure: Twinsen's Quest
Released: November 14th, 2024
Developer: [2.21]
Publisher: [2.21], Microids
Systems: PC, PS5, Switch (reviewed), Xbox
My brother and I had a copy of Little Big Adventure when we were kids. We never got particularly far, predominantly because its controls were absolutely bloody terrible. Even for 1994 the thing felt clunky as hell, so I dare say a remaster of Little Big Adventure with a more wieldy interface would be ideal.
Ideal is not what we have.
What we have is Little Big Adventure: Twinsen’s Quest, an unfortunate remake that does more harm than good to a game that, nostalgia aside, was never really all that great to begin with. The titular Twinsen is still an absolutely simpering dweeb though, so it gets points for accurate character portrayal.
Twinsen’s Adventure is a bit of a mess. From pretty much the start I noticed how sound effects would often play twice in a row or otherwise seem out of sync. The entire audiovisual production features frequent and stunningly immediate instances of object clipping and character animations. It's not so broken as to be unplayable but it's consistently defective in a multitude of petty ways.
When Twinsen moves through a pipe, he sometimes faces away from the opening and crawls toward nothing, or face the right direction but not crawl forwards, or do both, or just go ahead and crawl through a solid wall. The screen will still transition to wherever the other end of the pipe leads, but the litany of rubbish animations look amateurish at best.
It’s not just pipes - every time the game takes control of the protagonist from you, it fucks up. He’ll walk through objects, climb the air next to ladders, or drive vehicles into stuff. It needs to be stressed - these moments occur when Twinsen is acting independently of player input, these are prebaked animations, this is when Twinsen's Quest is in complete control... and it's totally out of control. It’s like the game is bad at the game!
Early on I had an NPC fail to do something for me because he started trying to walk through a bannister instead of going downstairs. I had to leave the building and go back inside to get the silly bastard working. Pathfinding in general seems to be a problem for every character, from background pedestrians to enemies. Once again, anything the player isn't directly handling has, at best, limited control of its faculties.
Parts of the HUD can displace itself. The most notable time for me was when my health bar shifted upwards so the top half of it got cut off beyond the limits of the screen. It wouldn't be the last time that parts of the UI would inexplicably shunt itself a little.
When I got off a bike, I couldn’t take a full step away without the game automatically interacting as if I'd walked toward the fucker. I had to constantly cancel a confirmation box while edging my way out of the bike’s radius in increments, all while Twinsen repeated “where shall I go now?” over and over with that simperingly dweebish delivery of his.
Bear in mind, all of this and more occurred within one hour and fifty-seven minutes of starting the game. Once again, none of it rendered the game unplayable but it nonetheless had me shaking my head in disbelief every few minutes.
So anyway, what's the damn thing all about when you ignore the many body parts phasing through solid surfaces with ethereal abandon?
Little Big Adventure was a French action-adventure game from 1994, and it was an interactive shitshow even in its heyday. It was a bit of a success, and now commands nostalgic respect, yet many would agree it needed dramatic improvement. You had to manually switch between different modes with bespoke commands in order to fight, jump, sneak, or act normally. Twinsen moved around like a lorry made of soapy feathers, animation took precedence over responsiveness, and combat was an absolute state.
Oh, and even as I child I cringed at how dweebesque Twinsen's simpering was.
Twinsen’s Quest has certainly made the controls less awkward, which is really the least it could do. To anybody mourning the loss of the mode system, I say come the fuck on. The fact you no longer need seperate control schemes when a single layout can easily handle everything makes for an objectively better interface. Animations have been wrangled for the sake of convenience as well - weird bullshit like Twinsen slowly whipping his entire head backwards before running is removed. When you tell him to do a thing, he does the thing without needing to make a flowery performance of it.
It doesn't just make the simpering dweeb more responsive, it makes him look slightly less of a fucking pillock to boot.
Parts of the story have been expanded, while others have been truncated. A good job’s been done of cutting out content that used to tread water while altering details to improve pacing or characterization. By far the biggest beneficiary of this is Zoé, whose role as a kidnapped girlfriend in the original reduced her to a prop. She has a lot more character - as in, she has a character - with a bigger role and a less mawkish voice.
The tradeoff is that Twinsen now has a Stock Little Sister to be kidnapped in the Stock Girlfriend's place, and honestly that one can stay kidnapped. Really though, while I have quite a few issues with the technical side of this release, many of the more creative changes are both bold and positive. I say this, admittedly, as someone who could never see the point in being too precious about Little Big Adventure of all things.
Unfortunately, overhauls to the rest of the game are either too minor to matter or just not evident, and Little Big Adventure doesn't feel pleasant to play despite all the streamlining. Twinsen might move a little swifter but he’s still a floaty, inelegant dipshit. His dodge roll is laggy and far too wide, his melee attacks amount to inaccurate flailing, and as for the ball throwing, well, it's more like ball torture.
So if you didn’t know, Twinsen has this magical ball that bounces toward enemies and damages them. It's a far better form of offense than his dweebish melee attacks, but that's really not saying much, especially since the ball is fucking shit. While [2.21] were making sweeping new changes, they really ought to have given Angry Tennis far more of an overhaul than it got.
You can switch between two arc trajectories and lock onto targets with an indicator that turns green when in range. The indicator is unreliable on a moving target, especially if the enemy AI craps out and it just runs around in circles. Also, if an opponent is too close, the ball will harmlessly pass through them. Once you're in range and ready to hope for the best, you throw, you wait, it hits or it misses, and then you throw again.
While you’re limply tossing a very slow moving ball, the enemies have guns.
Guns, if you didn’t know, are better than a shitty little glow-in-the-dark bollock. The evil Dr. Funfrock may be a dictator, but he at least arms his clone soldiers appropriately. He's figured out that guns have fire rates that far outpace the average dweeb's ability to throw a thing. It's not even like Twinsen gets any mobility out of it, since attacking and dodging are such disparate abilities to him. Throwing the ball is a commitment, one that almost always ends with a faceful of bullets because, again, guns are better than fucking bouncy balls.
That said, guns aren't better than simply walking away, at least in this game's world. Bullets move slowly enough that you can saunter past most enemies quite safely. If you avoid straight combat, enemies are a joke between their slow bullets, tiny aggro radius, and general stupidity. In fact, even combat can be cheesed by exploiting how dumb the AI is - your opponents have no concept of height differences, and if you can reach them from beyond their firing range, they'll usually stand there and take it.
At its very best, however, combat sucks just as much as it always did. Not only are the basic mechanics vile, it can take ages to whittle an opponent’s unknown HP to zero. Get used to hearing the same wibble-wobble sound effect as you toss a snail-like sphere over and over again, wondering when the sad repetition will end.
Oh, and if you’re unlucky enough, enemies might just stunlock you for a while - it really depends on how the game’s feeling. Whether you're hit by traps or bullets, you’ll basically take damage until you’re randomly allowed to act or lose a life and take advantage of the resulting iframes. God damn is Twinsen's dodge roll the absolute bloody pits.
You’ve got puzzles to contend with of course, and by that I mean you’ve got blocks to push and levers to pull. It’s typical stuff from the early 90s, a time before games drove such puzzling into the ground, so I can’t be too harsh about how simple it is. I can say the isometric perspective really gets in the bloody way though, especially with all the added environmental details.
There’s no excuse for the parts where you’re expected to grind money to afford certain items. Even collecting “Kashes” as much as possible wherever I went, I still needed to run in and out of a house repeatedly to spawn enough coins for a fucking catamaran before immediately having to raise money for a hairdryer in the subsequent section.
Piss off, videogame.
Anything that involves waiting for an NPC to do things is an exercise in twiddling your thumbs. All of them will casually saunter to wherever they need to be and take their sweet time doing shit when they get there. That is, of course, if they don’t decide to just bump into a wall over and over.
Despite all my complaints, I can’t say Little Big Adventure is a truly terrible game, neither back then nor today. It’s mostly just boring. Everything moves like molasses, the gameplay is monotonous, much of your time is spent wandering around looking for the right person to talk to while Twinsen repeats the same questions with every interaction. The process of finding out where to go next is like if Shenmue was even less than Shenmue already is.
The story isn’t very interesting and the characters are little more than stock personalities with obnoxious voices. Twinsen’s titular quest to save his feminine counterpart and discover a magical legacy was old hat even in the 1990s. The “funny” cartoon voices everyone has are a bit less hateful in the remake, but they're still grating enough to make me want to claw my ears off.
Beyond streamlining controls, the biggest thing this remake’s done is completely change how the game looks. The original 90s graphics are all gone, and even the basic art style has been significantly changed. Twinsen’s Quest boasts a more colorful look now, with an angular cartoonish aesthetic that I honestly just find a bit weird.
It’s a taste thing, really. I quite like the more vibrant colors, but otherwise I’m a little put off by how the world looks. It’s reminiscent of a children’s picture book but goes so far as to make characters appear lifeless, a problem not helped by the square eye pupils that really deaden Twinsen’s face. As a plus point, I'll say Dr. Funfrock looks a lot better than he used to. He resembles an evil genius now as opposed to a discount Fungus the Bogeyman.
The soundtrack has been redone by the original composer, and it’s… decent. Frankly, I feel it’s a bit too subtle compared to the original. I’m listening to the 90s soundtrack as I write this, and it’s a lot more bold, a lot less liable to quietly disappear into the background. I don’t mind a more ambient version, but I can’t say I prefer it.
None of the changes, good or bad, make up for what a slopfest the game is on a technical level. The bugs I mentioned at the start were only a selection. Twinsen being softlocked because he didn’t go down with the elevator he was standing on is a particular highlight. I was glad of autosaves for that one.
Gotta love it when entire floor textures disappear. Or when the map controls stop working and you can’t scroll through locations. Or when an NPC fighting alongside you repeatedly shoots at nothing, at you, or doesn’t shoot at all.
We’re not done…
Gotta love it when dialog boxes repeat themselves without prompting. Or when dialog boxes need prompting twice before they’ll work. Or when dialog boxes randomly cut themselves off. Or when dialog boxes don’t match the voice lines. Or when dialog boxes... you get the point.
I am in awe at how comprehensively this game screws up.
Playing Little Big Adventure: Twinsen’s Quest absolved me in a way.
I no longer feel like I missed something when I gave up on the original as a kid. The streamlined controls got me further than I ever did in the 90s, but all to be found was tedium. The remake does little to liven it up, but at least there’s some crude entertainment in marveling at how shockingly buggy it is. It serves neither as a polished update nor an impressive reinvention, and confirms more than anything that Little Big Adventure is best experienced by watching a Longplay of the bloody thing.
5/10
