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Puppeteer
One dark moonlit night, a young boy named Kutaro was carried away by the maleficent Moon Bear King to a black castle where the unlucky lad was transformed into a puppet. Kutaro displeased the terrible tyrant, who devoured the boy's wooden head and cast away his body. But the headless hero was not alone, for he had discovered a very special pair of...
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Puppeteer Reviews
Professional reviews from gaming critics
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Within minutes of starting Puppeteer, it's clear that it's an absolutely stunning game. The art style, the animation and the sheer amount of detail packed into each and every visual asset make the title a joy to behold. Trailers and screenshots simply don't do the product justice – this is something that you need to see in motion for yourself, on a nice big television screen.
As the current generation of consoles winds down and my focus begins to shift towards the next-generation I find myself trying to finish off many games that, for whatever reason, I hadn’t gotten around to playing or finishing. Puppeteer wasn’t on that list, but boy am I glad I had the chance to play this original and engaging game that was released by Sony Computer Entertainment.
The beauty of Puppeteer is that its charm and its execution overshadow everything else. For its occasional long-windedness, the story is quite captivating. For its intermittent cheap deaths, its overarching forgiving nature rises to the fore. For its occasionally frustrating platforming, its scissors-based traversal is a breath of fresh air. Puppeteer does a really nice job of overwhelming us with so much well-executed eccentricity, not much else matters. And frankly, there’s nothing else like it.
Puppeteer is a bold move for a company as big as Sony, and its presence on the PS3 is welcome. It’s worthy of praise that a brand new game property — a classic platformer no less — would get a full retail release this close to the end of the console’s life cycle. It helps, of course, that Puppeteer is also a genuinely fun game, one that is marred by its sometimes sluggish pace and tendency to be annoying rather than funny, but overall provides some much needed ingenuity at a time when videogames are ramping down in time for the next generation.
Puppeteer is, at its heart, a charming adventure, though not without its issues; it may have wasted the potential required with the interchangeable head idea to become something really special, but you will no doubt find yourself joining in with the audience laughing along to the antics on show and warming to the characters, be it hero or villain. There’s a great deal of fun to be had, even more with a friend, as you slice your way through Puppeteer. And the low price of the game is really just the icing on the cake.