Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5)
Sony scored a pretty big hit with the LittleBigPlanet series on PS3, and while the level creator was the star of the show, they also gained a nice friendly mascot in the form of the game’s doll-like hero Sackboy. He’s a flexible little mascot both in terms of appearance and purpose, so it’s not too much of a surprise to see him break away into an adventure that’s focused fully on him instead of his home series. Discarding the level creator and the sidescrolling platforming it was tied to, Sackboy: A Big Adventure lets Sackboy explores levels as he pleases in full 3D environments that seem to be surprisingly close to Super Mario 3D World in how they’re structured but still distinctly rooted in LittleBigPlanet’s aesthetic.
Sackboy: A Big Adventure takes place in a land known as Craftworld, a place where dreams are made manifest by way of crafting materials. Unlike Yoshi’s Crafted World which embraced the idea that the creators of such environments might not always be skilled in realizing their visions, Craftworld is visually splendid and lovingly stitched together. While it’s not always easy to tell what something’s made from at a glace, a closer look will help you start to realize how every piece of the environment feels like it was pieced together not by a construction team but someone with a needle, glue, and an absurdly high budget for materials. Sackboy being a little doll feels incredibly appropriate as up to four players run around the game’s 3D levels, the player still given some room when it comes to customization as they can unlock and buy costume pieces to mix and match to make many different outfits for the hero to wear.
While many areas in Craftworld are delightful and bright environments with happy bubbly music and beautifully realized backgrounds, not all is well in this world of dreams. A demented jester known as Vex seeks to shift the world to one of nightmares, capturing other sackpeople to work on his Topsy Turver device to mix together the many ideas of people’s dreams into a chaotic mess. Vex’s personality does come across pretty well in the basic description of him being a demented jester, but his delight at being dastardly makes it a treat when he keeps popping up along the adventure, sometimes for boss fights and others to interfere with the lives of people in the current world you’re exploring. A playful villain works in a world that feels so plush and friendly, Sackboy running into other characters who will help him against Vex like the elderly Scarlett who builds up the idea of Sackboy becoming a remarkable hero while very eager to brag about her past exploits. Gerald Strudlegruff can be found hidden around levels trying to be an explorer but making delightful little mistakes in identifying or even explaining what he’s found, ZomZom is a quirky shopkeep with whom you can spend the cutely named Collectabells you find in levels on new clothes, and each major world seems to have a central character with the greedy salvager crab King Bogoff feeling just as part of his underwater world as the ocean floor itself.
While the goal of most levels in Sackboy: A Big Adventure is simply to make it to the end, the path getting there is packed with little activities to give the process more substance. Dreamer Orbs are hidden around the level, these vital pick-ups key to unlocking the boss stages and thus players are encouraged to pursue odd parts of the environment or engage with little action puzzles. Sackboy’s basic skills are a pretty easy to understand bunch of platforming tools. He has a little flutter to extend his jump to make it over larger gaps, a roll that can speed up his ground movement, a slap and ground pound for attacking or breaking things, and the option to grab and throw objects. You also get a few buttons and options to make Sackboy emote or pose which can actually serve a purpose if you’re playing online multiplayer and want to communicate without your microphone. With this simple spread of skills Sackboy: A Big Adventure is able to make a wide selection of varied challenges and level types, some letting you run around fairly freely while others might tighten things to the point they’re practically 2D.
Whether you’re exploring an underwater museum, riding atop a jungle raft, scaling a mountain on tight ropes, or even running up the sides of buildings in an outer space metropolis, Sackboy: A Big Adventure doesn’t ever feel like it’s lacking in ideas. You’ll see some ideas crop up multiple times but they won’t wear out their welcome and the common basic enemies reappear with minor variations when found in different level themes. Bosses are actually rather simple though, the Vex rematches at least building up to harder variations despite the reused format but others feel a little basic or underwhelming. Usually though the combat feels more like just another obstacle in stages that are often trying to test your ability to handle some new navigation challenge. The Knitted Knight Trials are actually a fairly good showcase of the many different stage gimmicks as each one focuses on pushing one to a greater degree than elsewhere, ideas like floors that only appear when special creatures are near them finding use both as a danger in a regular level, a puzzle tool when going for collectibles, and a speed run challenge in the Trials.
Death doesn’t harm you too much either, many checkpoints found around levels and the penalty for meeting your end being a penalty to the bubbles you’ll be collecting all through a level. These bubbles are actually pretty useful though, the stage end always taking a tally of how many you got to provide rewards like costume pieces and even extra levels if you hit certain benchmarks. Having collecting pay off means you’ll always be kept occupied even in between the bigger set pieces of a stage as you gather up the goodies scattered around the place, but it can feel at times like the best collectibles like Dreamer Orbs are placed in a spot where you can easily miss it and then a deviously placed checkpoint ensures you can’t just throw yourself to your doom to try and go back to grab it. Collection is still a fun and breezy aspect of the experience that slips right into regular play rather than feeling at odds with it, the requirements flexible but the rewards for digging in deeper and going for more items tangible.
Levels exclusive to co-operative play also exist which crank up the focus on figuring out levels and embracing the puzzle elements more, the game doing a very good job of including designs that take some figuring out rather than just getting down the proper execution. Levels can also feature special tools for Sackboy to use like the boomerang-esque Whirltool for interacting with things out of reach, Plasma Pumps that let you hover and shoot charge shots, and the humble Clawstring whose grappling hook capabilities can actually be pushed a bit more than you would expect. Different ways to platform and different dangers that change how you approach a level keep the game’s many levels exciting and engaging, but a few levels stand out not only for their layout but for their musical accompaniment.
Some levels in Sackboy: A Big Adventure are set to licensed tracks, different segments of the song playing based on where in the level you are and the lyrics even kicking in for some of them. Hearing Britney Spears’s “Toxic” while fighting to survive in a corrupted technological world not only feels fitting for the stage, but the moving platforms and background objects move in rhythm with the song and enemies even dance along with it. Seeing the boxy creatures common in the level based around Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” interrupt their little marches to shimmy to the beat makes these levels a treat, but there are also more subtle cases where you might be playing a level and suddenly realize the background music is a cover of Madonna’s “Material Girl” but made slower and airy to match an underwater atmosphere. These stages are just uncommon enough that the game’s identity isn’t dependent on them but they’re fun to find, and since the game does a good job establishing its own world, action, and art style elsewhere, these special stages don’t feel like the only thing worth seeing in Sackboy: A Big Adventure.
THE VERDICT: Beautifully realized both in its visuals emulating a gorgeously crafted world and its clever use of licensed tracks to supplement a quality soundtrack, Sackboy: A Big Adventure certainly justifies breaking away from the series’s focus on user-generated content. The linear 3D levels provide plenty to do both in the environments and obstacles you engage with, collectibles scattered smartly to encourage deeper exploration while remaining rewarding as they grant you new costumes or stages. Fights often feel like they are a little limited or plain, but when they are part of navigating a stage rather than the focus they continue to build up a well put together adventure with fun characters and many ideas on how the platforming and puzzle solving can be approached.
And so, I give Sackboy: A Big Adventure for PlayStation 5…
A GREAT rating. Much like the environments have that hand-made feel to them despite clearly having an incredible degree of material access and talent used in putting them together, the platforming design in Sackboy: A Big Adventure feels like it’s knitted together from many wonderful ideas from other sources. I kept finding myself comparing it to games like Super Mario 3D World or Super Mario Odyssey favorably as it carries on the platforming ideas there and uses them to explore it’s own ideas for how a linear 3D stage can be built. Having “Uptown Funk” play over a stage set in the Tibetan mountains might sound an odd fit at first but the game both gels it well with the actual substance of the action and controls its progression well enough that it’s exciting to push forward to each new part of the song to see how the environment and visuals move along to it. The overall experience still maintains its own personality though with a charismatic villain and fun side characters with their own distinct personalities. Collectibles are great to grab since they’re not superfluous and placed well to both guide you through the stage or encourage you to look around more, and the puzzle elements are either given heavy focus in devoted areas like the co-op levels or integrated well with the regular platforming so they don’t slow things down too much. Enemy and boss designs could use some more variation or stronger ideas, but the Mario comparisons come back to mind since they don’t often lean too much on actual combat themselves.
Sackboy is such a good fit for the 3D environments and changing platforming mechanics that you wouldn’t even feel like he’s coming from a series that never embraced these ideas before. A remarkably polished 3D platformer that seems happy to pursue an idea just because it’s fun, Sackboy: A Big Adventure feels like it knits together a world worth returning to if Sony decides to continue pushing this approach to the series more. It has personality, quality gameplay, appealing visuals, and a good selection or original and borrowed music, so never did I feel like it was lesser for not having a level editor.