First of all, I’m not sure I believe this game is the sequel to another game that actually exists. There’s a wikipedia page for the original game, sure, but maybe that’s all just a psyop.
In my first 20 minutes of playtime here are some things that happened:
A tutorial pop-up told me to press the “action button” to talk to people. I proceeded to press every button to no result, until I finally pressed the jump button (until this point, never explicitly called anything, fair enough) and initiated conversation.
A beaver with an exaggerated country twang told me to go find his friend, who would teach me “To use the nuts!”
…Indeed.
Using the nuts just means throwing them, because why use a verb specific to the action. You only need to be pointed generally in the direction of a (seemingly always predefined by the game) target and you will automatically succeed in striking it.
A small bee I ran into informed me that it would “stick around with me for a while” in a soft French accent. When I came into the proximity of a locked door it just flew straight into the lock and unlocked it, then disappeared. Everyone knows that you’re Kao, apparently.
Another bee informed me, again in a French accent, to double jump up to grab on to some cargo netting and shimmy across a swiftly flowing river. When I double jumped, Kao grabbed onto the cargo netting with his ears because I guess the boxing gloves make that a tricky thing to do otherwise!
Speaking of water, I fell into a shallow body of it and I expected to either swim or do the “respawn nearby on dry land with some health missing” or something along those lines. Instead, Kao’s body sinks to the bottom like a fucking stone but his neck stretches enough to keep his head above water. You then proceed to run around more or less normally. I guess that was easier than programming swimming animations/controls. Or perhaps a nod to that terrifying factoid about kangaroos submerging themselves in water in an attempt to lure predators into a position to be drowned? Either way, extremely cursed.
Another beaver tried to coach me through defeating a knockoff piranha plant, by dodging its attack with my roll then “cutting the the stem with your powerful tail”. If there’s a button press or controller maneuver I need to perform to make this tail action happen I don’t know what it is so I got killed by the plant.
Then I decided to start this thread. I don’t usually do a lot of performative “WTF IS THIS OLD GAME LMAO” but god damn I feel like the reaction is appropriate here. If I didn’t think this game was stone-cold sincere it would honestly be pretty great parody of games of its time. Actually not even, this game came out in 2003!
It’s by a Polish developer I’ve never heard of which I guess explains a few of the awkward bits of writing. (Oh shit they made that game Steel Rats that’s been sitting in my Steam library for a while).
I gotta look up a GameFAQ from 18 years ago and figure out how to kill this fuckin’ plant, brb
Wait I forgot, also I freed a beaver from a cage and he dropped directly down onto a millstone/treadmill thingy and started running on it to power a mechanism. He’d been calling out for help but I guess he really wanted to get to work.
Only what he wound up powering was a water wheel… which I’m pretty sure was, you know, in some flowing water that should have just been making it move in the first place. Guy’s got a pointless job, he’s not even a cog in the machine, he’s extraneous to the cogs.
Naturally there is a “run toward the screen away from something scary chasing you” sequence.
The tail attack is just a jump attack. Those piranha plants are still really nasty business though. Certainly much harder to fight than the hammer-wielding dwarves(?) and bees (Non-French) that make up the majority of the standard enemies.
Btw whenever you free a country-twangin’ beaver from captivity and they have nothing to say to you or no guidance to offer, they just inflate a purple balloon and fuck off into the sky
Having played through the entirety of the first world, I bid adieu to beavers.
I am now in Snow World or whatever they called it. I got here by stowing away on a train. I had to stow away on the train, a somewhat rude parrot informed me, because I have no money. I have over 600 ducats, the game’s currency. I guess inflation has struck this strange world. The train conductor is German I guess? He says “Jawhol” to the chapter two villain, although the game’s subtitles translate it as “yeah boss”. The chapter two villain I just mentioned, who I seem to be in pursuit of/being pursued by is dressed like a stereotypical-looking “British Chap on Safari”. Khaki shirt and pants, pith helmet, elephant gun etc. His main mode of transport is a submarine.
I’ll tell you one thing about this is that no idea was cast aside. Mini-games, little bits of weirdness. This thing was game design free-association.
edit: I didn’t realize until I was about 45 minutes in that Kao has a voice, I’d always skipped through the dialogue.
I woke up this morning and my fervor had dulled. So I scanned through a (no-commentary) Let’s Play. Sadly it seems to get a little more mundane as things go along but there’s Snowboarding sequences and all sorts of junk so at least that willingness to throw anything in persists.
