Rayman Origins Makes Me Feel Like I'm Five Again

Amidst the thunderous, booming projections of helicopter crashing bro shooters, third person chainsaw massacres and neck slitting assassinators jutting all over the E3 show floor last week, there was a tiny beam of joy nestled in the corner. Rayman Origins is a reminder that video games can be beautiful, expressive and innovative without having to rely on blood and shotguns.

Sure, we get the annual nostalgia bucket list from Nintendo, whose New Super Mario Bros. Wii is probably the largest inspiration for Rayman Origin's frantic multiplayer platforming action. But Rayman Origins takes the template further than Nintendo is willing to these days, seeing as their direct sequel to New Super Mario Bros. Wii looks, feels and sounds exactly like its predecessor. But hey, they added Miis!

If you're familiar with the way New Super Mario Bros Wii played, you'll jump right into Rayman Origins' co-op controls. The demo on hand let us play as Rayman and Globox, two whimsically animated leads inspired as much by Ren & Stimpy as Mickey Mouse. The final game will feature up to four players traversing the vibrant worlds cooperatively, or as cooperatively as they'll let each other. You'll send them (accidentally or not) plummeting to their own deaths as much as you'll bring them back to life, using a "bubble" system similar to Mario's latest Wii outing. But in Rayman Origins, you don't float back on screen in a bubble after being killed. You float back as a bubble, your character inflated like a balloon, slowly bouncing towards his saviors. That's where most of the similarities end and Rayman erupts into a sublime vision that isn't just creatively tied down to a world of goombas and turtle shells and instead a world of hallucinatory vagary.

Rayman Origins is aesthetically gorgeous. Bold hyperbole like "it looks like a living painting" gets thrown around a lot in this industry, but it's apropos here. This can be a negative at times. Some stages in Rayman Origins are so cluttered with expressive background and foreground elements that it's easy to mistake something that will kill you with a subtle environmental detail. You'll also wish you could just stop and gawk at the beauty of it all, only to have it push you along faster than you're prepared for.



The pacing in general is more frenetic than your average "hop and bop past the dancing flowers" Mario level, but it mostly works towards Rayman's favor. Just don't think you can stop and smell the roses, at least on your first few playthroughs. The roses, as it happens, are actually out to kill you.

The variety of level design in Rayman Origins stood out the most in our demo. Most games throw a fire stage at you and call it a day. Rayman Origins wants to do the same, but does so by filling the screen with things associated with fire instead. You'll swing on red peppers over bubbling cauldrons while cartoon chefs squirt hot sauce at you, and you will die a lot. Everything burns the same as your traditional platforming ensemble, but in a way that rethinks the way we're trained to identify those things, and constantly.

On the flipside was the oft-dreaded water level, the moment in every platforming game where I reluctantly leap in, hoping for as fast an end as possible, so I can get back to land where things actually work again. But Rayman Origins turned my expectations on their sides. It controlled absolutely perfectly underwater – probably better than any game of its kind ever has. I immediately found myself swirling the joystick in circles as I watched Rayman swim around like a dolphin in paradise and my fears were quelled. This is a current-generation, sidescrolling platform game done right in HD, with all the attention to detail where it should be and all physics that feel right. Now it's just a matter of seeing if Ubisoft can keep the juggling act entertaining from start to finish.

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