15 Dec, 2010
Since the release of the iPhone and the iPod touch in mid-2007, handheld gaming has taken on a life of its own, becoming the ideal springboard for hundreds of independent developers to launch their games into the public consciousness.
One such game turning heads at the moment is Scarlett and the Spark of Life, the first entry in the Scarlett Adventures series developed by New Zealand-based team Launching Pad Games. The Spark of Life is an eclectic mix of point-and-click adventures like Myst, Broken Sword and Monkey Island with an extra injection of dry wit and humorous dialogue.
The Spark of Life opens with the titular, crowbar-wielding Princess Scarlett drugged and hogtied to the rump of a horse as the villainous Woolfe and his intellectually-challenged accomplice Ernie attempt to kidnap her. Naturally she escapes in spectacular fashion, ending up in a forest clearing with a birds nest on her head (I laughed). The princess formulates a cunning plan to recover a horse and gallop away into the night, far from the insidious clutches of Woolfe and Ernie.
Princess Scarlett exhibits her charming royal demeanor in the game’s opening scenes.
Scarlett’s quest takes her onward to the town of Monteil, the home of the pocalcos, an overly-affectionate name for rabid llamas with an unfortunate penchant for eating horses. There she manages to take refuge from her captors and happens upon, of all things, a baying mechanical horse head. After a brilliantly vitriolic exchange of insults and thinly-veiled sarcasm, Scarlett and the horse head – upon whom she bestows the nickname Gherkin – form an unholy alliance and agree to help each other out.
The slightly left-of-field aim of The Spark of Life is to build a body for the horse and use it to escape. Scarlett is a 2D point-and-click adventure game, perfect for the iPhone’s touch-screen interface. Tapping anywhere in the field will move the princess to that location, while tapping on other characters will open up a series of conversation options. Tapping on items in the field will interact with them, while a tap on the handy star button in the bottom right-hand corner will indicate exactly what can be interacted with on that screen.
Items you will find include fence posts, four-leaf clovers – even smelly hairy fruit – and believe it or not, they all have their uses, be they practical or otherwise. A tap of the button in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen will open Scarlett’s rucksack. The items contained within can be examined or used by dragging them from the rucksack onto key points in the field. Some instances, such as using the aforementioned birds nest on a pile of rocks in order to cushion the fall of a can of paint from a rooftop, can be a little vague bordering on ridiculous. It’s not out of the ordinary to get hopelessly stuck and wind up using each item on every point of interest, trial and error until something happens, though this is fairly typical of the genre.
Times are hard.
The Spark of Life looks beautiful. In-keeping with the genre, the richly detailed, colourful backdrops create a feel of an interactive comic-book storyboard. Scarlett is a purely text-based adventure featuring no voice acting and in fact, very little sound altogether, though the few instances of incidental music are a brilliant fit and always raise a smile. More importantly, Princess Scarlett is a well-crafted and very likeable female lead, complete with a striking look and the kind of ascerbic attitude that Margaret Mountford would weep for.
Scarlett and the Spark of Life is a brief affair, clocking in at about an hour, maybe stretching to two if you do get stuck. The true appeal of these apps is the opportunity to kill five minutes on the bus, or between meetings, while those who have the time to sit down with Scarlett and play it in one sitting may end up feeling a little short-changed.
Though the Scarlett Adventures are developed in New Zealand, the dry, deadpan sense of humour feels wonderfully British to me, the kind very rarely seen in video games. That brilliant humour, genuine talent and better yet an abundantly clear love of games has gone into making The Spark of Life a well-designed, often hilarious and fantastically entertaining adventure, paving the way for Scarlett’s next madcap adventure.
Scarlett and the Spark of Life is available on the iTunes App Store now, priced at £1.79. For more information on the Scarlett Adventures and Launching Pad Games’ other titles head to their official website!
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