Rayman Origins

Rayman Origins is a great game because I can’t fully explain why. Something about its supple, roly-poly level-design just clicks.  Its endless sea of preposterously desultory worlds and constructs disarm my critical mind of ‘Designers do this so we know to do this which equals this effect’ but instead transports me to a nostalgic time where I played adventure platform games like Crash Bandicoot or Rayman 2, for no other reason than to see what I would do next. Every couple of levels, I wonder ‘what are the default floating platform/swinging vine/enemy going to look like in this area?’  Well, it certainly won’t be easily recognizable as a ‘default’ anything. Its imagination is too far-reaching for that.

And yet, this insurmountable visual ebullience is never overwhelming. There’s brevity to Origins’ hand-drawn images, one that works to support its design. Somehow, amidst the flagrant colours, I’ve naturally found a way to play this game. This is what I can’t fully explain. I seem to have picked up the instincts to know how to operate each level with grace, and when I fail, each time I’m convinced it is my own fault, and usually even smile at myself for failing, eager to get another shot. The same cannot be said of another recent platformer ‘Sonic Generations’ It’s overly lush and complex backgrounds are pretty, but they violently tussle with its level-design. As much as I try, I have not yet learnt how to play Sonic Generations, instinctually or otherwise. It’s Rayman Origins’ marriage of aesthetics and level design that makes it so compulsively playable that I’m filled with the same wild-eyed enthusiasm its title character ‘Rayman’ is. The world is illogical enough to include, a limbless hero, unattainably delectable fairies (who are also a little clumsy), fountains of watermelon juice, and treasure chests that flee when found by Rayman, somehow consciously knowing he’ll bash them open. And yet, it’s all carefully constructed in a way that produces its own internal logic to navigate each world.

Rayman was created by unattainably delectable (but-also-a-little-clumsy) fairies, to be a hero of the melancholy forests that have always served as an identifiable anchor to the largely undefined universe. Yet, as in Rayman 3 the world lies in languid perfection, until Rayman accidently, or sub-consciously, creates the enemy through his own lazy blunder. It’s a funny sentiment, but it could be the driving force of earnest stories (and has) If the world is perfect, then what does the defined hero do? Rayman exists to be a hero of the land, just as the unattainably delectable fairies exist to be unattainably delectable, but also clumsy enough so Rayman gets a chance to save them. So we need villains, and that’s why Rayman has to accidently make them. (He snores too loudly that a next door race of ‘Black lums’ go rogue on peace-deprivation) This funny sentiment has been quickly accelerated by my imagination, but in Origins, it exists as merely as a small funny sentiment in a background of funny sentiments, usually in the form of visual inventiveness and level names (so far I’ve climbed through ‘Jibberish Jungle’ and taken a dive into the ‘sea of serendipity’) With all these aimlessly cute sentiments, The world Rayman inhabits exists to be a happy defiance of logic and reason. But as a defiance of this nature, it’s perfectly wound, from the colours to the design to the sound effects (which are indistinguishably merged with a superb original score) to the weird characters.  Both Rayman and his world are just the right combination of cheeky and bliss. Not too cheeky as to be mean-spirited, and not too blissful as to become a sanitized family-friendly dope. To play Rayman Origins is not just to play a virtuoso platformer by masters of the highest class, but to submit yourself to an idea nursery of such nourishing imagination, that it deserves the right to not make sense.

This is one of my favourite games of 2011.

- Taha