The Spirit and the Mouse, we tried the adventure with the guardian mouse
The Spirit and the Mouse
Gathered together after a violent storm, a mouse named Lila and the guardian spirit Lumion decide to forge an unprecedented alliance to help the inhabitants of Sainte-et-Claire, a small French village that got into trouble precisely because of the storm: many electronic devices have stopped working and we would need someone who can fix them.Luckily controlling electricity is exactly the talent that Lila has been given by her new friend: the mouse can emit small shocks and interact in in this way with a multitude of objects, trying from time to time to get in touch with the tiny Kibblin spirits so that they can resume animating the devices of the people who live in the village. Are we facing a beautiful fairy tale or an unhappy experiment? We tried The Spirit and the Mouse thanks to the demo available during the Steam Next Fest, and here's how it went.
Structure: the guardian of good deeds
The Spirit and the Mouse, Lila walks a roof The demo version of The Spirit and the Mouse basically consists of a single mission, probably set in the early stages of the campaign. Lila and her friend Lumion find themselves having to play the role of custodians towards the inhabitants of Sainte-et-Claire, and so they agree to grapple with a series of tasks that will be used precisely to solve the problems of the people who live in the village.In this case the incipit is a sequence in which we see the elderly patron of a bar waiting to attend the last episode of his favorite TV program. Too bad that the storm has put out of use the antenna of the room: a terrible disappointment, which we will have to try to remedy. How? Finding some Kibblins and asking them to restart the electrical device the TV is connected to.| we want to define it, of The Spirit and the Mouse. From the blunders of the third-person camera to the interactions with the scenario, the gameplay of the title developed by Alblune looks like that of an adventure from another time, precisely about twenty years ago. An approach dictated by the desire to address a very young audience? Maybe.
The control of the mouse works well and its ability to emit small electric shocks triggers a mechanism whereby we will find ourselves hitting any "bright" object within the scenario, in order to obtain the amount of lightning needed to unlock shortcuts, find the location of the Kibblins and finally restart the antenna in order to solve the problems of the elderly customer of the bar.
There is nothing complex in the environmental puzzles of the game: you simply have to reach certain places by climbing on the objects scattered throughout the scenario, whether they are chairs or walls, and once there, activate the discharge to obtain a certain result and make sure that the little spirits are convinced to return to the electrical device from which have escaped.
This last part involves the completion of small mini-games involving the Kibblins: one of them will ask us to guess three times where to is hidden (easy, in the only objects that occasionally "jump"), another to retrieve the mail of the villagers and put it back in their respective boxes, yet another to redirect three repeaters.
Realization technique: there is atmosphere but little else
The Spirit and the Mouse, Lila in front of the device that can solve the mission Even from the point of view of technical implementation, The Spirit and the Mouse adopts somewhat dated solutions . The game does not lack the atmosphere, after all, the scenario of the small French village from this point of view constitutes a very solid starting point, but the technologies used return a modest visual impact.Visual problems, especially in confined spaces, they stand out from all the rest during the simple exploratory phases under the command of the mouse, and the hope is that between now and launch the developers can arrange to fix them; perhaps adding a pinch of personality to a sound sector that for the moment is distinguished only by the banality of the effects, while the musical accompaniment is completely absent.
Judging from the demo, The Spirit and the Mouse is promises to be an adventure that starts from excellent conditions and a good atmosphere, but with somewhat banal mechanics and an outdated technical realization, also spoiled by a few too many problems with the camera. That said, the game is likely to appeal to an extremely young audience of users, who may actually appreciate the story of the guardian mouse and the people he will try to help. Or maybe not.
