One of the first pleasures of Pax East 2017 was meeting with the developers of Super Cloudbuillt. The game has a very sci-fi like feel to it and was originally released as Cloudbuilt, but has been totally remastered by the Developing Studio, Coilworks and published by Studio Double Eleven.
I can’t say as I ever played the original Cloudbuilt, but I was highly impressed with the new Super Cloudbuilt, and I’m sure the developer that was kind enough to guide me through what I played was almost certainly as equally as impressed with the number of times I died along the way. (A huge thank you to Anders Davallius for all his patience in dealing with me!)
Before I even really got started, the color scheme used in game was enough to grab at least some of my attention. The environment was filled with so many bright colors to look at. Getting distracted by these colors might have been enough to kill me once or twice, but I died by my own lack of concentration or knowing what I was doing so many times that it did not really make much of a difference, to begin with.
The world itself put me in the feel of a world which had been struck by some kind of disaster. This is probably due to all the colors that reminded me of all the books I had read where some sort of nuclear detonation had taken places, coloring everything weird shades of everything. The environment appears to be covered in numbers of dilapidated buildings along with broken bits of bridges and structures that have long since begun to fall apart.
When the game itself starts, you wake up as a young girl in a destroyed building and a mysterious blue orb guides you in the right direction as you have to learn to free run and parkour while also learning how to traverse the terrain and use it to your advantage. Along the way, you gradually acquire new skills and obtain a weapon with which to defend yourself.
The game itself is engineered to teach you new tricks and ways to survive to make your life in the game easier and even possible when it comes to progression. The thing that I both really liked and disliked that there were ways to bypass the unofficial tutorials, which meant you did not learn whatever lesson that part of the game was trying to teach you, which made later tactics in the game a tad more difficult to overcome.
Me being me, while I was running up walls and skyrocketing over objects that were easily five and six times the height of myself, I had the urge to ask the developer where the idea for a parkour style game had come from and whether he had ever done any of it himself. His reaction was simply to laugh at me while looking at his hands, stating that while he would love to have the capability to try even half the stuff that he was running me through in the game, that he would no longer be capable of developing games for me to demo and play.
Honestly, I don’t think that I got to play long enough and I know I certainly didn’t get to die enough. The beginnings of the story definitely left me wanting more and more. This will certainly be one of the games that I have to go back and play in order to finish the story and perfect my parkour techniques…in the game at least.