I’m impressed. Creat Studios proved to the world, at least the part that cares and matters, that minis can be a full-on gaming experience.  Freekscape: Escape From Hell is my first ever PS minis game and it left me with a positive impression. It also doesn’t question my intelligence and actually forces me to question it myself.

So what is this game about and how much does it fare for its price tag of $4,99, which seems at first glance a bit high for the concept of “minis”? Read on to find out!

Developer: Creat Studios
Date of Release: April 8, 2010
Platforms: Minis (PSP, PS3) [Review copy was played on PS3]

Genre: 2D-Platforming Puzzles
Players: 1

Story and Presentation

Hell, isn’t a fun place, Freek, a devilish creature, is stuck doing chores because he won’t bring himself to cause harm to others.  But he’s had enough so he sets out to make his way to Heaven. Shortly on his way, he finds a magical trident in a treasure room and will make good use of it to make his way to Paradise, where he hopes things are a bit better.  Of course, being magical, the trident has powers, which powers you ask? Well, the powers to poke other devilish creatures and make good use of them to solve puzzles.

The setup is slightly childish, but makes for a good setup for the whole game, and got me playing for much longer than I expected a game of this price to make me, and well, everything holds well together.  For example, you’re a devil, and so are your enemies, so you or they can’t die or feel pain. If they come to an outcome where they would normally die, they will simply appear back from their designated portal, just like you do, except they’re also checkpoints in Freek’s case, when you fall off.

As far as presentation is concerned, booting the game will be the place where you’ll wait the most. You’ll get a lot of loading time when trying to create a save file and actually going into the game.  That’s most likely more related to the minis architecture than anything.  But after that, the loading is barely noticeable and makes for smooth transitions while you’re actually playing.  Whenever you “die”, you re-spawn at your portal really quickly, which prevents from really frustrating you from your failure. The same goes for the other devils, if they meet a bitter fate, they’ll be back at their portal in a matter of a few seconds.

Other than that, the world map is easy to navigate, the in-game controls works pretty well on the basic things, but I’ll be covering a few issues in a bit about these.

The game does make good use of things like 2D and 3D. The graphics are obviously 3D, the gameplay though is in 2D most of the time, but still takes that third dimension into consideration for a few things.

Graphics and Sounds

This is a PSP game. I played it on my PS3, expecting it to look not so good. I must say the actual upscaling of the graphics exceeded my expectations.  Yes, it’s still noticeable that the game is originally in the PSP resolution due to some lack of details, but it comes out really clean on my 32’’ TV.

The actual models and textures are on the level of your average 3D PSP game and really far from being an eyesore and could be actually be called “cute” if anything Tim Burton created as ever been called that too.

While the canned sound effects are to be expected in a game of this size, a lot of the music is reminiscent of the music found in Little Big Planet, with ironically cheerful, yet sometimes a bit too repetitive beats.

A nice touch from the developers too, is how some (or all?) of the levels are deviations from songs names.  Songs like “sticking in the name” obviously refers to Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name of and “number of the freak” refers to Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast.

Gameplay

As for the meat of the game, I was simply baffled. Weak minds really does need not apply here, you’ll be broken.  Hell is a tough place, but I’d have assumed this cutesy one wouldn’t be so bad. Turns out I was wrong.  This game requires a lot of thinking and ingenuity to use the tools at your disposal. It also had me take 26 minutes to beat a level that can be sped run in less than two minutes. But I like it.  Too many games these days are holding our hands and afraid to make us feel stupid, so they reward us, whether we tried or not. This game does not.

So how does it all work? A lot like Kirby’s Adventure on NES and a few of its sequels, and again it does not.  Using your magical trident, you poke devils of a multitude of variety to use their abilities to solve puzzles and make your way across tricky platforming.  As an example, you’ll be using some mushroom looking devil as a spring and/or pogo stick, a two-horned devil which packs quite a punch, a devil with an ability to suck you in their mouth and spit you out.  There’s a lot more than those mentioned here, like one that makes you glide and one that really loves hugging anything and they all play a part in your escape.

Also, all devils will be pissed-off, increase their powers and attack the nearest devil when you let go of them, which plays a lot in solving your way to heaven.  One puzzle that comes in plenty of flavours is one that uses switches and doors.  The switch requires one of the devils that loves hugging to activate, and they’re usually in a really hard to reach spot, and then you’ll have a limited time to reach the related door.  And don’t underestimate those too; I rarely made it more than just in time beyond a door.

While puzzles play an important part, there’s also an equivalent part of well-designed platforming.  From leap of faith to tricky timing, there’s plenty to go around in terms of jumping from one platform to another and that part doesn’t disappoint.

There are also a few things that annoyed me, like how I’d bounce back really far in specific conditions like being thrown toward a hugger devil instead of being caught by it or how jumping would “not work” like a lot of old-school NES games that were unforgiving in your jump button press timing.  But really, these are minor complaints, given the nature of the game.

Overall

It’s been years since I’ve seen platforming mixed with puzzles so well-thought out. Little Big Planet and New Mario Wii have nothing on this.  Though these two have their fun side of things, Freekscape requires a lot of planning and foretelling.  This does have a down-side.  I couldn’t complete the game, and I’m afraid a lot of more casual and less casual players will give up way before where I got stuck and I personally lost too much time trying to figure some stuff out.  Maybe I was just not seeing something obvious too, but at that point I doubt it. I still managed to get plenty of hours of fun with this. There’s also a steep curve on execution at some points. Like you’ll see the solution to the puzzle, but won’t manage to do all the tasks it requires without messing up and needing to start over, too many times.

Pros and Cons

Pros

- Variety of abilities are fun to use.
- Awesome plaftorming
- Some really fun puzzles
- Interesting secret paths to explore.

Cons

- Progress-blocking difficulty is sometimes really frustrating.
- Controls are slightly less functional than I’d like to see them.

PSP minis impressions

This next part has nothing to do with the actual game and more about the minis themselves so feel free to skip it.

Minis have been available since last Fall on PSN, and been playable on the PS3 (as well as the PSP) for almost as long now, but I don’t think anyone here had given those a spin yet.

Well, I must say I’m fairly impressed by the system, which didn’t show much issues on the PS3, even though it’s ran on PSP coding. The only real issue I’ve come across was when I first started the game, the creating save files took a bit of time, but I imagine that’s because it needed to create/emulate a PRO Duo Stick or something.

The scaling on the tested game, as mentioned above, is working really well and doesn’t show any artefacts from the resizing. So if you see any minis you are interested into but worried it won’t look too well on the PS3, I would stop worrying and grab it.

This whole category seems also like a great way for smaller development teams to prove themselves.

The Save Factor

The starting price of $5 is a bit too low honestly. $7 would be a better price in my opinion, even if I couldn’t get to the end I’ve had enough hours of enjoyment, more than plenty standards PSN games sold twice the price. Heck, if you think you can get through all of it, I’m rather sure you’d get your money’s worth at $10.

NOTE: We were given a copy of the game for review. This does not affect our judgment of a game.

David A. Games