Review for Storm Boy. Game for Android, iOS, Mac, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 21/11/2018
1964. At the cinema there is “A hard day's night”, the first Beatles film, while the first Nutella pack comes out of the Ferrero factories. At the same time, in Australia, the writer Colin Thiele publishes his most famous book: Storm Boy, a novel about the between a boy and his animal, a pelican. The book will receive a film adaptation in 1971 and, a 47 years away, a videogame.
The guys of Blowfish Studios they took on the arduous task: converting a story that is not easy to bring to the screen, trying to make it accessible to the greatest number of people.
Making well the poem that contains the story that binds the protagonist to his pelican is a difficult task. It is a bond that is based on trust, built on time, which presents the two characters linked to a landscape - the South Australian coast - that seems painted by a melancholy artist. Storm Boy, as the protagonist is called, wanders alone on the beach, daydreaming while observing the birds that crowd the sandy shores trying to feed on some fish darting out of the water. However, not everything is so peaceful and clashing with the light-hearted atmosphere of the first moments the finding, from the boy, of a nest with three small plucked pelicans, left alone and welcomed without hesitation by Storm Boy.
Everything seems to be going well until Hide Away, the boy's father, urges him to let the now healthy and independent pelicans free. Reluctantly Storm Boy obeys, albeit shortly thereafter Mr. Percival returns to the scene, one of the three birds, who has decided to stay with his good Samaritan. Although this is just the beginning, the story is more or less all here, you want for the brevity of the title (which can be completed in less than an hour), due to the fact that from then on the story proceeds mostly horizontally, narrating - in a very short but not trivial way - the daily life of the couple of friends and the development of their .
The adventure is linear and its rhythm is dictated by the pace on the beach of the protagonist and the various mini games present within the title. Their number is not large - there are some nine in total - and they are in really simple mechanics: he will find us drawing on the beach, throwing the ball to Mr. Percival or exploring the beautiful seabed dotted with unrivaled flora and fauna. It is important to note that, except in one case, the mini games present no challenge and, mind you, this is a choice desired by the developers. You will not find yourself competing against someone, you will not have any points to beat, you will have no reason to get frustrated at the end of them.
You will play for the sake of playing, free to go out and walk back along the coast in bare feet at any time. It is also this atmosphere, this calm that hovers around us, at least in appearance, that contributes to making the experience truly special. The duration, as mentioned above, is really short and we would have preferred a greater prolixity of the story in certain situations, trying to describe the development of the story of the two protagonists and of the secondary characters in the best possible way and in more detail.
The soundtrack of the title is not very varied and presents, in most cases, variations to the main track; but yet this is one of the elements that most of all contributes to making the story better live. The melancholy and beauty of the music accompanies the title for its entire length and allows us to better appreciate both the playful moments of the couple of friends, and the hardest ones in which the almost dreamlike atmosphere of the game world is broken by cruelty of real life.
Who is such a game intended for? In its very basic mechanics, Storm Boy could be fully enjoyed by a very young user, perhaps accompanied at the same time by an adult during the experience. Unfortunately in fact the title is only available in English and, while the events on screen are quite eloquent, understanding the story thoroughly is important. The title delivers at the same time important food for thought even for those who are more advanced in age, who may find in this title an oasis of peace and will be able to deeply appreciate the underlying theme, in addition to the artistic sector that frames some scenes that can deeply touch even the heart of an adult.
Assessing Storm Boy is a very daunting task. On the one hand it shows a remarkable artistic sensitivity of the developers, capable of bringing to the screen an important story like that of Thiele, but on the other hand it shows the side in the purely playful side of the work. However, genuinely approaching titles of this genre you can be pleasantly surprised and, why not, also moved by the ending. The vote we wanted to assign to the game is not a sterile sum of the overall values of the title, simply because some factors - the emotional one in this case - have a greater specific weight than the others, but they cannot obscure the obvious deficiencies of the game.
► Storm Boy is an Adventure type game developed by Blowfish Studios for Android, iOS, Mac, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 21/11/2018
