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Tobe's Vertical Adventure
PC (Steam)
Falling Can’t Happen Horizontally
2.5/5 stars
“Tobe’s Vertical Adventure” (“TVA”) is a retro-styled Indie platformer made by Singapore-based developer, Secret Base. “TVA” is one of the few Xbox Live Indie Games releases that was considered of high enough quality that it managed to transcend its lowly birth and move onto other platforms, like Steam and Android. Indeed, “TVA” has apparently sold enough copies that it has spawned its own franchise. Since I’m always on the lookout for a good 2D game to balm my eyes after playing a modern 3D game with a horrible camera, I decided to pick up “TVA” as an impulse buy when it was deeply discounted during a Steam Sale.
Presentation
“TVA” is apparently supposed to look like a Sega Genesis game, based on the physical mock-up displayed prominently on Secret Base’s website. And it actually DOES do a good job of emulating the visual quality of games from the 16-bit Golden Age. The sprite-based characters are well animated, and the background tiles offer plenty of diversity and small details. It’s nice to see an Indie developer targeting the 16-bit aesthetic when so many take the easy/cheap way out and go for the low-hanging fruit of an 8-bit aesthetic (or, even worse, use graphical assets made in MS Paint).
The soundtrack is limited in scope due to the game’s shortness, but features a handful of catchy tunes. Whenever I find myself humming a game’s tunes (or just have them stuck in my head), I know the composition is high-quality. In the case of “TVA” the title screen tune stuck with me for weeks.
The only real presentational flaw in “TVA” is a bit of technical iffiness. I had trouble getting the game to recognize my Xbox 360 controller. In addition, even when playing with a controller, the game shows keyboard-only labels on the menu and pause screen. Furthermore, “TVA” refuses to run in 1080p, which forced me to play the game at a significantly lower resolution than I would have liked.
Story
Most platformers don’t really need a strong narrative story to drive the action. They instead strive to keep the player bouncing from stage to stage, with the gameplay driving the player’s interest in progressing. Platformers do, however, need some kind of plausible (or surreal) excuse to get the action going and to bring it to a halt at the end of the final stage.
“TVA” does an adequate job of providing an excuse narrative to act as bookends for the game’s incredibly short duration. The story begins with the titular Tobe, a nerdy gamer otaku, sitting in his living room playing videogames. His fun is interrupted when his improbably-thighed girlfriend, Nana, shows up with a treasure map and demands that Tobe help her search for the treasures of King Garuza. Dragging Tobe away from his controller, Nana climbs into a hot air balloon and the duo disembark for the island detailed on the map.
Each of the game’s 4 worlds consists of 4 stages. Upon completing a world, a cutscene plays that ties the action to the next world in sequence. It is also possible to see slightly different cutscenes depending on which of the two characters (Tobe or Nana) the player chooses.
While not mindblowing or epic in scope, the limited excuse narrative in “TVA” does a good job of expressing the characters’ personalities, provides momentum between the game’s stages, and wraps up with a happy ending. In short: It does everything it needs to do.
Gameplay
Each of “TVA’s” 16 stages is a vertical drop, hence the game’s name. Tobe or Nana (or both, in a co-op game) starts at the top of the stage and must work their way down to a large treasure chest at the bottom. Along the way, they can collect coins, open smaller treasure chests, and rescue a number of cute animals. Upon reaching the large chest and opening it, a timer starts and the stage begins to collapse. The player’s character must then make their way back to the entry point at the top of the stage, frequently following newly-opened routes. In essence, “TVA” follows a similar gameplay formula to some of the more recent ‘WarioLand’ games.
In order to prevent players from just base jumping to the bottom of the stage, Tobe and Nana take damage if they fall too far. Each character starts with a different number of life hearts, which can be increased by collecting large amounts of stuff while playing the game’s stages. Both characters also have the ability to collect and use two power-ups: A balloon for drifting horizontally, and a rope that sticks to ceilings and provides a climbable surface pretty much anywhere. The number of power-ups the characters can carry at once can also be upgraded in the same way as life hearts.
The stages in “TVA” are well designed and feature clever layouts. Most stages have few, if any, enemies, and rely on instant-death spikes or bottomless pits instead. However, the thing that I found killed my character the most in “TVA” was the controls. It doesn’t matter how well-made the other parts of a game might be if the controls are terrible, and “TVA” suffers from some truly awful controls. I had difficulty with Tobe doing his wall-run technique when I didn’t want him to, or refusing to duck-and-roll when I wanted him to… I even had trouble getting him to do something as simple as grab a hanging vine in mid-jump simply because the game’s hitbox for vine-grabbing is so unnecessarily precise. While I wouldn’t have really cared about accidental deaths thanks to “TVA’s” liberal checkpoint system, the fact that this forgiving checkpoint system is attached to an unforgiving limit of 5 deaths per stage meant that I had to repeat the descent portion of stages numerous times only to be killed by sloppy controls in the ascent portions.
Overall
“Tobe’s Vertical Adventure” is an aesthetically pleasing throwback to the days of 16-bit 2D platforming. Unfortunately, it is also a throwback to the days of sloppy controls ruining otherwise good games. If Secret Base tightened up the controls, “TVA” could become a hidden gem. As it stands, though, “TVA” more closely resembles all of those forgotten ‘yet another platformer’ titles that never managed to get a foothold in gamers’ collective consciousness.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Overall (not an average): 2.5/5
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