Are you ready to gather pies in pursuit of the elusive Chronoberry Pie? You should be, especially if you’re a fan of recent puzzle fantastics, Braid and Portal. Although the story is essentially nonsensical, the game play is not. The Misadventures of Mr. P.B. Winterbottom is a puzzle game in which you record copies of yourself (well, Mr. Winterbottom, actually) in order to collect the requisite number of pies in a level to progress. Oh, and you and your copies can beat each other with canes to launch each other into the air to nab out-of-reach pies.
As the game progresses, the rules constantly change, offering continual challenge until the mysterious Chronoberry Pie is finally yours. You hold down a button to record your actions, and then your copy replicates that sequence over and over until you cancel it or the copy runs into a hazard (e.g. fire) or is launched with a cane. The first several puzzles are very easy, but they get complicated rather quickly. Initially, you might create a copy sequence so that your copy activates a switch to allow you to access a pie behind a wall or jumps on a teeter totter to launch you onto a pie-filled ledge. Later on, however, you will have to coordinate the recordings of several copies in order to have them jump on each others’ heads and launch each other into the air. There are limits in each level on how many copies you can have in any given level and later on, all of the pies must be gathered within a certain period of time after you touch the first one.
As mentioned, the story is fantastically absurd and is not the draw of this game. However, the style is a nice change of pace and fits well with the eccentric story. The game is done in the style of early 1900′s silent films. It is almost all in cartoony black and white, with dashes of color only for contrast. When you are recording, the perforated sides of a film reel appear at the edges of the screen. The developer, the Odd Gentlman, went so far as to include visual anomalies to mimic flaws in old film reels or random particles that get stuck to film and show up on the screen during projection. The music perfectly accompanies the s art style, focusing on whimsical piano elements in the style of music that was played live during silent movie showings. That attention to detail in the art direction made me buy into the style and let me then be, at least partially, pulled into Winterbottom’s travails.
In the story mode, there are five levels consisting of 75 puzzles. The story mode is not especially long — three or four hours. However, the game requires a fair amount of experimentation to reach the solution because the timing of how your copies interact is essential to progress. You will likely get stuck on a puzzle here and there that will take you quite awhile. None of them felt beyond the reach of the tools you are given, though, and finally discovering the solution to more difficult puzzles felt very rewarding. And, at least for me, the difficult puzzles felt well-spaced out. So often when I finished a difficult puzzle after fiddling for thirty minutes, I would zoom through the next several puzzles more quickly, allowing any frustration from the more difficult puzzles to dissipate.
For those who want more challenge, a challenge room consisting of several puzzles is unlocked when you complete each of the five levels. Most of these require you to gather pies in a certain period of time. For the competitive, there are leaderboads allowing you to compete against friends (or strangers) to see who can get the lowest completion time for each puzzle.
For the puzzle fan, this game is a no brainer. It’s an inexpensive Xbox Arcade Live game offering several hours of story mode puzzling in a unique style along with challenge rooms and leaderboards to extend the game experience. There’s not an engaging story, but who needs one with such inventive puzzles to bend your mind? Eat the pie, Carol Anne.
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