Retro Reviews: Little Big Adventure

Little Big Adventure is one of the most interesting games in the annals of video game history. It is inspired by dystopian novels like 1984 from George Orwell or Aldoux Huxley's a Brave New World, where people didn’t had any liberties at all. To make a better example; in the retro video games world Little Big Adventure can be related to Normality, a game with a similar premise although Normality came a couple of years after Twinsen’s Adventure.

Little Big Adventure was a game ahead of its time. Even today it is ahead due the strong storyline that the game has. Not only the story was ahead for is time, also the graphics and sound of the game were unique in a time where most of the games were made almost 2D. Little Big Adventure broke the conventionalisms and introduced the players a new kind of adventure. However it wasn’t fully 3D as the game is a mix between isometric views, and only the characters and certain aspects of the environment are 3D. That being said, after almost 14 years since the game appeared, it still rocks.

The gameplay of Little Big Adventure wasn’t easy to do on the computer, since most of the computers of that time weren’t strong enough to support the graphics. The game tended to freeze at certain moments. I can say that because I had the game many years ago and it was a pain to play, but now with the advance in technologies even the most simplest computer can run the game without any inconvenience. Another difficulty that I found with the game was in the controllers, they were difficult to handle and it wasn’t simple to play the game with the keyboard. That difficulty could be resolved at certain degree by plugging a joystick, since the directional cross didn’t give too much freedom with the screen map.

The game is not an abandonware, but it can be found in several sites over the Internet such as La Selva del Camaleon (Chameleon’s Jungle). It will require a subscription before proceeding to any download, although the subscription is free but it has some limitations. Little Big Adventure indeed is truly catchy, even for today standards, and the game can be played without getting bored.