Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers

by Piyoz on Aug 8th, 2014

Steam sales. Can’t live with then. Can’t live without them. I told myself this summer that I wouldn’t buy any discount games. I swore. My backlog was big enough. I was stern. Adamant. Then Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers went on sale for mere cents. I felt my hand twitch. My pupils dilated. My heart rate accelerated. The sweat began to drip from my nose and chin. My vision became blurry, unfocused and uncertain. I woke up hours later, nude on my front lawn, debit card in hand and one email in my inbox from Valve thanking me for my purchase.

Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers is an indie platformer developed in 2012 by German game makers Black Pants Studio. It tells the story of a guy named Tiny whose underpants are stolen by his nemesis Big. (The joke here? Big is smaller than Tiny.) Tiny chases Big into the desert ruins to retrieve his sole family heirloom. “Odd” is an understatement.

Tiny crashes into the entrance of an enormous stone temple in chasing Big. Luckily, our hero carries with him some fancy equipment for traversing this new terrain.

First is his ray gun. Tiny’s backpack holds a special ray gun that slices through almost any material. From a third person perspective, use M1 to draw a line across just about any object in the environment to slice it in half. Or just take a sliver off it. This game’s physics engine makes dicing rocks and pillars unpredictable. And throughout Tiny’s journey, the player has to use this ray gun to make paths up towers and into dungeons. This requires a lot of creativity on our part.

Tiny also carries a tow cable. Click M2 to shoot a wire out and attach to any surface. When attached to moveable objects, you can move backward to drag game assets around. Again, all this is done to solve puzzles and advance through each stage.

Last but not least, there is a rocket gun. Not a rocket launcher or anything. This gun shoots a tiny attachable rocket that clings to objects. Press the scroll button on the mouse to fire one, then press it again and hold. The rocket will then propel the object it’s attached to forward as long as you hold the button. It’s basically a reverse tow cable. The uses for this are also very clever and a blast to experiment with. In fact, carving up these maps like a Thanksgiving turkey is more fun than I can accurately explain. It’s all experimentation. You have to make a cut and hope the physics acted in your favor. Luckily, there’s no penalty for death of your creation smashes you flat.

All these items are used by Tiny in his adventures to hunt down his underpants in ancient pyramids and such. I have no idea what these buildings were supposed to be. This game doesn’t really explain anything but the weapons. You’re not even given a clue of where you’re supposed to go or who the characters are. Why do I care about Tiny’s underpants?

There’s no real story to speak of. Which is just fine for a little indie platformer that plods along with gibberish voice acting and text boxes Banjo-Kazooie style. It’s hilarious to me how awkward and nonsensical all the dialogue is. It seems like a really bad translation. Seeing as the Black Pants website also has very awkward English, I’m just going to conclude here that the English language skills of the developers consist of nothing more than high school and maybe a semester or two at university. Or maybe Google Translate.

Okay, so the story is lacking. Tiny & Big makes up for this in presentation. The graphics of this game are something to note. Environments look like something out of Borderlands, with very heavy outlines and dash marks to give off that hand-drawn feel. I tell ya, I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

There’s one aspect of Tiny & Big that really blew me away. The soundtrack. The in game music is composed of assorted tracks by various indie rock and electronic groups you’ve probably only ever heard of if you lived in Germany. And they’re sick. You find these songs on cassette tapes scattered throughout the game. Explore and find more sweet jams! I was more motivated to find more soundtrack than I was to find this game’s useless collectable: Boring Stones. In short, beige clumps of dirt are not as motivating goals for game design as something that actually affects the player’s experience.

Not that said experience goes on for that long. Tiny & Big shouldn’t take you much more than three hours to complete. Three hours of solid entertainment for ten bucks? That’s like a movie. It’s a short game; don’t be confused. Don’t let that dissuade you from checking out a fine indie platformer.

4/5

Very Entertaining

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