Playing The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom made me ask myself some very serious questions about my love of pie. Exactly how much do I love it? Would I commit horrible crimes to feed my insatiable need for the scrumptious desserts? The answer, of course, is no. I’m not crazy. Well, at least not as crazy as the mischievous and pie obsessed P.B. Winterbottom from developer The Odd Gentlemen’s debut puzzler.
The player takes control of the aforementioned Winterbottom in his quest to get his fingers on as many of the delicious pastries as he possibly can. Along the way, he encounters the pie of his dreams: a gigantic one. On his way to capture the myth-like pie, time is messed up causing him to go back to his previous crimes. Winterbottom acquires something in his trip back through time: the ability to record himself.
The main goal of the game is to collect all the pies scattered around each level. To do so, Winterbottom makes good use of his newly acquired ability. By holding down a specific button, the player can record their actions. Once the button is let go, a clone is made and begins to loop. The clones can also be stacked or hit to allow even more access to pies that are too far away. In later levels, the game gets a bit trickier by introducing new gameplay types, including pies that only clones can touch and red clones that kill Winterbottom instantly if touched.
The puzzles are smartly designed, making good use of the components given to you. That said, the puzzles aren’t the hardest in the world. I only found myself really stumped a couple of times throughout the fifty plus levels. But even then, it didn’t take very long to figure out the solution. This type of difficulty can be good thing for people who don’t see the end of puzzle games often, but can also cause others to feel unsatisfied about the difficulty.
The whole game has a very nice charm to it. The entire game has the look of an old black-and-white silent film. The story is mainly told through drawings along with rhyming verses in-between each level. Going along with that look and feel, the game is split up in five episodes, each with their own pie-themed name. As the episodes are completed, new bonus episodes are unlocked. Each bonus level contains five levels which test the player in two ways: how fast they can finish the level and the minimum number of clones used.
A person can most likely finish the game, bonus levels and all, in about one or two sittings. After that, there isn’t really much a player can do with Winterbottom. There are leader boards, but only the people that really obsess over getting the best times are going to get anything from it, and I don’t see that type of obsession happening with this game.
The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom is a charming and competent puzzle game. At 800 Microsoft points, the game is certainly cheaper than most of its counterparts. But with a difficulty that may not satisfy the needs of a lot of puzzle game fans, and a lasting appeal of only a day, Winterbottom is a hard one to recommend over other games of its kind.