It’s really easy to dismiss Little Big Adventure (known as Relentless in America) as a kid’s game, especially when you take a look at some of the screen shots. There’s cute graphics, talking animals and even things that look like hot dogs wearing army hats. Sure, these things are all important elements in LBA, but there’s also a much deeper – and more awesome - game under the surface.

LBA is an action adventure with the emphasis placed on the ‘adventure’. The story revolves around the games protagonist, Twinsen, as he fights against the oppression of the planets dictator Dr. Funfrock, who has turned the entire world into a police state.

It sounds like the setup for a fairly dark game, but with the overall presentation of the game being so damn bright and colourful, everything looks more like something from Richard Scarry than George Orwell.

The story takes you from a prison cell in your home town across numerous different islands and then right across the world of Twinsun (Yes, the games main character and the planet you are on have nearly identical names), and it far exceeds the story telling of most of the games around in 1994 when LBA was released.

There are no space marines, orcs or other generic nonsense here. There is a dragon like thing, but it’s more used for transportation than as a plot point.

LBA was one of the first games to really take a big bunch of genres and mash them up to great effect. You’ll find elements from RPGs, action games, platformers and adventure titles here, but the overall experience is very unique.

Time in the game is split between fighting, talking and exploring and there’s even times when you’ve got to combine and use inventory objects to solve puzzles.

It’s the way LBA handles all these different elements that makes it so unique, though. Using four different modes, Twinsen responds differently to the same set of controls.

Pressing the action key in ‘Action mode’ sent Twinsen into a kicking and punching frenzy, while pressing it in ‘Athletic mode’ caused him to jump, complete with a wholly unnecessary but hugely satisfying ‘BOING!’ noise.
Rather than have a game with different actions mapped to far too many keys, you’ve got single set of controls that changes based on your situation.

What could have been a disastrous and fiddly control system gives the game added depth as you worked out the best way to approach a situation.

There are some highly frustrating elements in LBA though, and as time goes on it’s gotten harder to forgive the game. The engine works well for both fighting and exploration, but an isometric view is not well designed for platforming.

Twinsen controls more like early Resident Evil characters than Sonic, and there are some incredibly frustrating jumps in the game not to mention any number of instant death traps it’s impossible to avoid in your first play through.

It’s all made worse by the fact that in the PC version, you can’t just save anywhere you like. It’s something we’re used to these days, and playing LBA back now it just seems like a cheap shot to make the game last longer. Annoyingly, such a limitation was not included in the Playstation version of the game.

It’s these action sequences that meant LBA never received an overwhelming amount of attention. Pure adventure gamers hated that the game had fighting and jumping as part of the mix, while many people into action games felt the game was too slow and had too much story.

It still received good reviews, but genre mashups were far less accepted back in the mid nineties than they are today.

Whether you enjoy jumping around and fighting or not, there’s certainly a feeling of satisfaction – and relief – when you move on past the platforming segments towards the more capable parts of the game. Either way, you never actually want to give up LBA completely because the story is just so damn compelling.

But really, there’s no one element of the game that is more enjoyable than the next. It’s nice to see action and adventure mix so well without the need for stats and levelling up, but the real charm of LBA is in its world and characters, it’s hilarious voice acting and the knowledge that you’re playing a game about brutal oppression that also has talking elephants.

A die hard community of LBA fans resides over at the Magic Ball Network, where the community works on various mods and programs related to the game and its sequel, Twinsen’s Odyssey.

LBAWin is of particular note, as it will allow you to play both CD and downloaded versions of the game on modern systems without problems.