A scene from the Playstation 4 game Tearaway Unfolded.
A scene from the Playstation 4 game Tearaway Unfolded.
Tearaway has been given the PlayStation 4 port it deserves - but upgrading the Vita's best platformer wasn't easy. Chris Schulz discovers the origami game's port gave developers a few paper cuts.
Tearaway is a magical game that asks you to play basketball with apples, ride pigs around forests unfurling around you, and wander through creepy carnivals complete with chilling accordion music.
But at some point while playing the PlayStation Vita's 2013 wondrous platformer, every gamer will have had the same thought, which is: "This might be the best game I've ever played."
Developer Rex Crowle hopes fans have the same feeling when they're playing Tearaway Unfolded, the game's PlayStation 4 port that quietly came out earlier this month.
"We are our own harshest critics, and none of us would be satisfied with a traditional port," the heavily bearded Crowle told TimeOut. "It would have lost all the magic and not been the creative explosion that a Tearaway game should be."
A scene from the Playstation 4 game Tearaway Unfolded.
So he and his team at Media Molecule spent the best part of a year overhauling Tearaway to make sure the PlayStation 4 upgrade "works as a cohesive and emotional journey.
"I think it might take existing fans a while to actually spot anything they recognise," Crowle says.
In Tearaway, players take control of a Sackboy-like character called Atoi, guiding him through a colourful wonderland of adventures and puzzles.
The game's graphic style - a paper-based world that unfolds around Atoi - gave Tearaway the feel of a Cubist-era painting.
It was easy to fall in love with - and hard to put down.
Unfolded uses Tearaway as its blueprint but overhauls several key areas: there's a new introduction, a change in narrator, different puzzles, upgraded graphics and improved features. A scene in which Atoi rides a paper plane that was unable to be completed on the Vita is included, thanks to the PS4's "wind mechanics".
Media Molecule developer Rex Crowle, creator of Playstation 4 game Tearaway Unfolded.
But the biggest change - and the one that gave Crowle's team the biggest headache - was transporting the game's mechanics from the hand-held Vita console to the PlayStation 4 controller to utilise its lightbar and touchpad.
As Crowle puts it: "We wanted to make the controller feel like it's coming to life in your hands."
Yes, the hand cramps that Tearaway induced during lengthy sessions on the Vita are also present on the PS4. That's because the game encourages full interactivity, using the controller to catch objects thrown out of the screen, light up segments of the screen, and import photos into the game.
A scene from the Playstation 4 game Tearaway Unfolded.
Crowle, whose next project, the ambitious Dreams, was unveiled at this year's E3, is happy with the outcome.
"We concentrated on building a world where each blade of papery grass sways in the breeze, and each crease in the floor squashes down as you walk over it. Now it's on a big screen and we've rebuilt the content to match, all of that detail is far more visible.
"It's even closer to what was in our heads."
Who: Rex Crowle, game developer from Media Molecule What: Tearaway Unfolded Platform: PlayStation 4 For fans of: LittleBigPlanet, Ori and the Blind Forest
