30 years ago, we experienced one of the best years in the history of videogames. It's actually wild how many all-time greats landed in 1994. Genre-defining—heck even genre-creating—classics were just being flung at our heads with wild abandon.
X-COM, Warcraft, Doom 2, TIE Fighter, Super Metroid, EarthBound, Final Fantasy 6, System Shock, Wing Commander 3, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, Master of Magic, Theme Park, Beneath a Steel Sky, Tekken—and this is just a taste of what we were playing three decades ago.
But for 9-year-old Fraser, who had very limited spending money, it was all about one game: the peculiar French action-adventure romp, Little Big Adventure. This oddity, which put you in the slippers of a fugitive with a magical ball and a penchant for comfy, flowing robes became an obsession for me: particularly because it was pretty damn tricky, but also because it was absurdly ambitious—a free-roaming journey full of fatal conundrums, non-linear quests and a world that, to my under-developed brain, seemed endless.
The remake, Little Big Adventure – Twinsen's Quest, is out today, and I am experiencing a nostalgia overdose. It has changed quite a bit, from the art direction, which makes the world a bit more exaggerated and cartoonishly colourful, right down to the mechanics, but so much of what enchanted me the first time around perseveres—just with less of the stuff that frustrated me.
LBA veterans might remember the stance system, where you'd need to switch stances to run, fight and sneak. It seemed clever at the time, for reasons I can't quite remember, but in truth it was a mega faff. As a kid, I died so many times because I panicked while trying to switch from the neutral stance to the aggressive one, only to get a kicking from an angry, anthropomorphic elephant cop. Well, that's all gone. Now it's all handled like any other game, and you have access to all of your actions without the need to switch.
Strangely, though, sneaking has been tossed out entirely. Instead, you can hide only in specific situations. That's not to say there isn't an element of stealth: one of the first things you do, when breaking out of an asylum at the start of the game, is don a nurse's uniform to get past some guards.
I've noticed a bit of criticism aimed at how it looks, but I really dig it. LBA was always cartoonish, but by today's standards the environments were often quite muted and basic. Looking at old screenshots, I'm surprised by how much they deviate from my memory of what, at the time, seemed to have such a colourful, whimsical visual identity. Thankfully, the remake's overhaul makes them feel so much more lively and playful, but crucially without making LBA look like a modern game. It's still got major '90s vibes.
Some of the dissatisfaction with the game's new look might stem from the fact that LBA was actually a pretty dark adventure at times, despite being seemingly aimed at kids. You effectively become a prophet/terrorist, attempting to end the reign of a megalomaniacal scientist and his fascist regime. But LBA has always been a dichotomy, flitting between whimsical and mature, playful puzzle-solving and beating up clone cops.
I've only just dipped in, but it's already taken me right back to '94. That said, it doesn't seem like something that's exclusively going to appeal to middle-aged gamers wanting a bit of a throwback—there's plenty to recommend it, even if you've got no experience of the original. At the very least, you won't spend nearly as much time being murdered by the controls as I did, back in the day.
