Before we begin: nope, Little Orpheus is a walking simulator.
In recent years The Chinese Room has – quite unfairly, I reckon – been maligned for its “walking simulators”, games that take you through gentle, if powerful, tales that unfold as you wander, as though a thoughtful game without guns and spurting arteries is somehow less worthy of your time and money. This patently isn’t true – and that’s coming from a shooter fan – but perhaps in acknowledgement of that criticism, the studio’s latest endeavour breaks free of the moulds cast by the evocative Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and instead takes you on a rip-roaring 60s adventure through a smorgasbord of bright, beguiling places.
Little Orpheus reviewDeveloper: The Chinese RoomPublisher: Sumo DigitalPlatform: Reviewed on iOSAvailability: Out now on iOS
And it’s so well made, too. The visuals are delightful. The score is the perfect jaunty accompaniment. The voice acting is sublime, and the light, humorous narration that goes back and forth between our two characters is sprinkled liberally, but not overpoweringly, throughout the tale. Each chapter shares DNA, yes, but they take you to an exotic new location every time, a story stuffed with mystery and magic and dinosaurs and giant worms and technicolour walruses and magic helmets and Krakens lurking deep on the ocean floor. Every segment is an unmitigated delight to explore, and its pitch-perfect script is delivered by an impressive cast with gentle, light-hearted perfection. As he bumbles through Plutonia – a wild, impossible world sitting at the earth’s core – our protagonist, Ivan Ivanovich, will shriek with nervous glee – or should that be gleeful nervousness? – as he lurches from one squeaky-bum moment to the next.
The world we explore comes courtesy of Ivanovich’s retelling of where he’s been for three years, entirely MIA. Despite failing his medical (and being caught cheating on his entrance exams; I kind of love him already), Ivanovich is a Soviet cosmonaut selected not for the space race, but for a trip heading in the opposite direction; the centre of the Earth. The story unfolds as Ivanovich is hauled before his General, the intense Yurkovoi, and forced to account for the three years he had… well, disappeared off the face of the earth, taking the priceless atomic bomb powering his exploration capsule with him.