30 years ago, we experienced one of the best years in the history of videogames. It's actually wild how many all-time greats landed in 1994.
Genre-defining—heck even genre-creating—classics were just being flung at our heads with wild abandon. X-COM, Warcraft, Doom 2, TIE Fighter, Super Metroid, EarthBound, Final Fantasy 6, System Shock, Wing Commander 3, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, Master of Magic, Theme Park, Beneath a Steel Sky, Tekken—and this is just a taste of what we were playing three decades ago.
But for 9-year-old Fraser, who had very limited spending money, it was all about one game: the peculiar French action-adventure romp, Little Big Adventure.
This oddity, which put you in the slippers of a fugitive with a magical ball and a penchant for comfy, flowing robes became an obsession for me: particularly because it was pretty damn tricky, but also because it was absurdly ambitious—a free-roaming journey full of fatal conundrums, non-linear quests and a world that, to my under-developed brain, seemed endless.
The remake, Little Big Adventure – Twinsen's Quest, is out today, and I am experiencing a nostalgia overdose. It has changed quite a bit, from the art direction, which makes the world a bit more exaggerated and cartoonishly colourful, right down to the mechanics, but so much of what enchanted me the first time around perseveres—just with less of the stuff that frustrated me.