An impossible adventure awaits in Little Orpheus, the brand-new adventure from award-winning studio The Chinese Room, a Sumo Digital Studio, available from today exclusively on Apple Arcade.
From the BAFTA-winning team behind Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, Little Orpheus is a side-scrolling adventure game about one comrade’s journey to the centre of the Earth.
The year is 1962. NASA are trying to put a man on the moon but in a remote corner of Siberia, a Soviet cosmonaut is heading in the other direction. Ivan Ivanovich is dropped into an extinct volcano in his exploration capsule, Little Orpheus, to explore the centre of the earth.
Ivan vanishes, emerging three years later claiming to have saved the world. In a top-secret bunker, he is debriefed by the fearsome General Yurkovoi. Little Orpheus casts players as Ivan as he recounts an adventure beyond belief: a tale of lost civilizations, undersea kingdoms, and prehistoric jungles deep below the Earth’s crust.
Brought...
Little Orpheus' two strong points are the same as the strong points from The Chinese Room's other two games. The thing is, here they've added a third element -- platforming -- that's not nearly as compelling, and it's enough to make the game a far cry from their previous standard.
Little Orpheus began life as a video game for phones and, on those platforms, its limited gameplay probably did not stand out as much. This made it easier for the narrative and the presentation to impress players and to keep them moving to see how the story of Ivan and the nuclear bomb ends.
While the colorful underground worlds in Little Orpheus look fantastic, the terribly bland platforming and irritating story drag the whole experience down into the depths.
If you think storytelling is more important than gameplay then you should definitely give this 4-hours long "comedy series" a chance. Just don't expect too much in terms of gameplay.
