It’s hard to imagine a time existed when you could visit your favourite online gaming store and not be overwhelmed by a dazzling array of low cost, high style indie games that promise  the kind of innovation the big boys simply can’t offer.

So here we have a mostly black and white platform game that was designed by students, employs a small element of colour and a time travelling mechanic, uses heavily stylised visuals and boasts an absurd title. Future developers are going to have to try hard to tick more ‘indie’ checkboxes than The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, but is it actually any good?

Winterbottom is going to be familiar territory to anyone who has played Braid, although given the largely different way the game presents itself, gamers shouldn’t presume that liking Braid will mean they should rush out and buy Winterbottom, and vice versa. The similarity lies the game mechanic, and little else.

In Winterbottom the objective of the game’s (sort of) anti hero, P.B. Winterbottom, is to collect pies. It’s a deceptively simple goal for a game that revolves around creating clones of yourself in order to run tasks, flip switches, and interact with your present self and other clones in order to grab the more difficult pies.

It’s a difficult concept to describe, but luckily it’s very simple to actually play. At least, getting a grasp on the basic mechanics will only take a few minutes. Actually completing some of the later puzzles will require plenty of guesswork and brain power.

New mechanics and elements of a story – told backwards through time – unfold at a healthy pace, and you’ll soon come across pies which have to be collected in numerical order, or pies which only your clones can pick up.

The puzzles are only difficult until that minute where everything snaps together and you’re suddenly kicking yourself for not figuring it out sooner. This is a sign of all good puzzle games, and a feeling you’ll get many times over when trying to figure out some of the very clever elements in the more complex levels.

However, players looking for a puzzle game where mental ability is the only skill required to succeed may not find Winterbottom to their taste. In some levels, even once you’ve figured out what to do actually setting the plan in motion can take not only some platforming skill but also some trial and error where timing is concerned.

It’s this element of the gameplay that feels the weakest. A few badly timed attempts at something that know ‘should’ work can break the flow of gameplay and feels so much more unfair than being with a tricky puzzle that you’re not sure how to solve. By the time you do finally get the skill element of a particular puzzle down, the joy you found in solving it has long since been wiped out by frustration in getting things to click together.

While the black and white graphics might seem to be added purely for indie cred at first, by the time you finish it’ll be hard to imagine the game without them. The overall art style and inventiveness in the different characters and locations far surpasses most other indie titles, including Braid.

Winterbottom is a game about collecting pies, told in rhyme. Because of this, it’s a lot more whimsical than the screenshots might lead you to suspect. Far from being pretentious and aloof, Winterbottom is quirky and charming, falling somewhere inbetween a scene from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Lemony Snickett’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Although P.B. Winterbottom may have control of time, you might find your own time with the game running short quickly; experienced puzzle gamers will probably strain to ring three or four hours out of the title, even with the extra bonus levels. You’ll likely spend many more than that being stumped on the later levels, but even with achievements the game doesn’t really lend itself to replayability.

So where does Winterbottom stand in the grand scheme of all things indie? It gains a firm distinction for being witty, polished and including some real substance underneath all that style.

Five years ago it may have been a truly innovative title but with Braid fresh in our minds, it’s harder to describe it as such. Barring a few frustrating timing setups in the later levels though, it is fun, and that’s a far more important quality.
 

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Reviewed By: Daniel