Within the first five minutes of starting Puppeteer, your player character is kidnapped, turned into a puppet, and has his head ripped off. That sure sounds like a kid’s game, huh?
In case you were worried that happiness and rainbows were just around the corner from the game’s dark beginning, the producer of the game has spoken out on who, exactly, Puppeteer was made for. Speaking to Joystiq, Tsubasa Inaba said, “It’s not necessarily for kids. The minute you design a game that appears to be for kids, the kids are turned off by it.”
That is a very true statement, easily seen in the animation industry. Any cartoon that has ever stuck with you through your life did so because it was not made for kids, it was made because that is what the animators wanted to see for themselves. Kid’s can be some of the absolute worst critics imaginable, trying to understand what they like and want can be a maddening task for the parents alone, how well would a development studio fair? The fact that Sony and Japan Studio are aware of this is a very good sign that Puppeteer could end up being a platforming classic a Sony system hasn’t seen since the Klonoa series.
And, like Klonoa, Puppeteer is a 2.5D platformer, full of style and charm as Kutaro jumps his way through a constantly changing theatre set. Along the way he will find three replacement heads for the one he lost, giving him special abilities such as a spider head that gives him access to places he can not normally reach.
You can check out the action for yourself in a brand new Halloween trailer below:
