Be Excellent To Each Other

Each year, as part of their degree course, teams of students from the DigiPen Institute of Technology have to create a game; famously this course requirement resulted in Narbacular Drop in 2006 which was essentially the demo for Portal. It was so well received that Valve straight hired the whole team to go on and create Portal and Portal 2 which is one of the reasons people keep an eye on what comes out of DigiPen.

One of this years games is the frankly fucking bonkers Perspective, which has you guiding a character through a series of levels (and the old school arcade that frames the individual levels) by flipping between first-person perspective and 2D platforming at the click of a mouse. It's a difficult mechanic to describe but basically your character freezes in place when you switch to first-person and you line up the various objects in the level so that, when you flick back to 2D, you've opened new paths for your character to progress. The closest thing I've played to it is PS3/PSP game Echochrome, except that I got bored of Echochrome before the demo finished whereas I'm thoroughly enjoying Perspective. Solutions to some of the puzzles are obvious but there are quite a few head-scratchers in the levels I've played so far. It's one of those games that give a sense of accomplishment when you finally work out the solution and, of course, it seems hilariously obvious as soon as manage it. Here's the demo video which I imagine makes more sense of it than my ramblings:



I'd assumed it would just be a prototype sized thing but I've been playing it off and on for a couple of days and still haven't finished it so there's a decent amount of game in there. Best of all, as with all the DigiPen games, it's free to download here and well worth it in my opinion.

Note also that they keep an archive of all their previous games so, if you fancy seeing the humble beginnings Portal grew from, Narbacular Drop is also available to download from link at the start of this post. I imagine there's some other good stuff in there as well and one of these days I mean to have a trawl through all the stuff that's available.

Their website is down, guess it is a bit popular.

It's up for me at the moment?

yeah got in eventually. Just took a few tries and was v.slow.

Doesn't Paper Mario work on the whole 2D/FPS idea?

I was going to say that this sounds exactly like Paper Mario.

I've never played much of any of the Paper Mario games but I've never seen any screenshots or video showing a first person perspective. It certainly mixes 2D looking 'sprites' interacting with a 3D playfield, but I didn't think there was ever a first person perspective involved anywhere?

Didn't Paper Mario just rotate 90 degrees? I've not played it, but that's what it seemed to do on the adverts.

I just checked some YouTube videos and, assuming this is representative, then Paper Mario is a pretty straight 3D platform game but with an art style that makes the characters look 2D-ish because it looks cool; it doesn't actually mix 2D and 3D at all. Perspective though does properly flick between the two depending whether you're controlling the camera or the character, which can completely change your interaction with the objects that makes up the gameworld.

I'm pretty sure it does. You can switch to 3D mode to walk behind things that are too tall to jump over ,etc.

I'm only going by the videos I saw on YouTube; as I say I haven't played very much of the Paper Mario games (a SNES version through an emulator for a while once maybe) so I could very well be wrong.

To be fair, I'm going off my memory of the TV advert, so I'm even more likely to be wrong.

Surely someone around here played it?

Paper Mario wasn't out on the SNES, it first appeared on the N64. You're probably thinking of Super Mario RPG?

I have Paper Mario, but it's still sealed.. and therefore I've never played it.

Super Paper Mario on the Wii you could switch the camera from side on 2d to over the shoulder 3d to solve puzzles and find hidden paths.
The other Paper Mario's are 2d sprites in a fixed perspective 3d world.

Ah, fair enough. I can see how Perspective sounds like Super Paper Mario on *ahem* paper then; but it's really not. Anyone who wants to see why it's not should play the actual game.

Nope, it turns out I was thinking of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga for the GameBoy Advance. Fuck knows why though! Mostly down to idiocy I suspect.

It'll be the similar names.

Just finished this and it was excellent fun, although some of the mechanics in the last few levels seemed a bit shoehorned in. The 'ending' also made me laugh.

Reminds me on the Playstation puzzler Endochrome. Actually, I never played Endochrome but it looks like it might remind me of that if I'd got round to playing it.

Aye, that's the closest comparison I could come up with. I never liked Echochrome though as it was very constrained but you have a lot more control in Perspective which I preferred.

Is it anything like the PSP game Crush?

No idea, I've never come across Crush.