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    The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom

    Game » consists of 4 releases. Released Feb 17, 2010

    Enter a macabre and comical silent film world filled with mischief, time travel, and delicious pie. Record yourself and harness your time bending abilities to cooperate, compete against, and disrupt your past, present, and future selves. Winterbottom's debut misadventures present whimsical spin on the notions of time, space, and play.

    getz's Winterbottom (Xbox 360 Games Store) review

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    • Score:
    • getz wrote this review on .
    • 13 out of 13 Giant Bomb users found it helpful.
    • getz has written a total of 2 reviews. The last one was for Winterbottom
    • This review received 2 comments

    Charming, Inventive, Short.

    Winterbottom is not the most like-able character. Stealing from orphans, flooding the local town, and setting fire to a bakery are just a few of this man's sins. For what, you may ask? Fucking pies! I mean, there are some things I would soil my integrity for (all of which involve Heidi Klum) but pies? Ah, but while pies lead to his damnation, they also represent his salvation. Given a second chance to correct his mistakes, a magical, time-bending super pie bestows upon P.B. the ability to go back in time to save himself. Oddly, and paradoxically, all of these terrible things were done because he was chasing this magical pie in the first place. And there it is at the end of every level, floating about and taunting you to continue. It's hard to say what this pie is a metaphor for, as it both moralizes about P.B.'s mistakes and enables his desires. It's like the angel and the devil on your shoulder rolled in to one. 
     
    But on to the game. 
     
    The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom will inevitably compel people to compare it to Braid, and they would not be entirely out of line for doing so. You are introduced to a core mechanic (cloning yourself and collecting pies) and with each subsequent set of stages that mechanic is tweaked to make you change your methodology as you work your way through increasingly complex puzzles. The object of the game is to collect every pie on a stage, using clones of yourself. The cloning mechanic is implemented excellently here: you can record actions such as jumping or swinging your umbrella or hitting a switch, and then your clone will repeat the action infinitely (or until you disrupt the recording in some way). You are given a limit to how many clones you can have out at once, and the later levels will ask you to collect pies in order, or using only your clones, and so on. Other than these parameters, you are free to do whatever you like. You can record for as long as you want (with the exception of the last set of levels) and most puzzles have multiple ways of solving them. The learning curve is asbolutely perfect, trickling out mechanics and giving you simple puzzles to start with after learning each one. Each puzzle is incredibly inventive, and a few will have you scratching your head trying to figure out the right way to do things.  
     
    There's a small hiccup though: it's all over right when you start having fun. The game can be completed in 3-4 hours tops. However, there are five bonus worlds in addition to the five story-line worlds that ask you to complete each on with the fastest time and the least amount of clones. These bonus modes are where the game really shines, as they really stretch your brain out and can bring out the perfectionist in you as you try to find the best possible way to complete the stage. In the story mode, you can be pretty sloppy and get by just fine. 
     
    The style of this game more than makes up for it's brevity as well. The ragtime music, black and white grainy film layer, and the over the top, 18th century gentleman dialect (I DO SAY SIR!) all make for a wholly realized and effective aesthetic. You really get the feeling that The Odd Gentlemen created exactly the kind of game they envisioned. Combine that with a story line that is composed entirely in rhyming verse, and an ironic sense of humor laced in a subtitle for each level, and you have a very charming little game. I can't stress enough that the only reason I complain about the length is that this game was just so damn good that I needed more. It was like steak VAPOR. I'm the homeless kid staring at the rich people eating Fillet Mignon through glass. I know there are a lot of cheap skates out there who think 10$ is a lot to pay for a game, and others who think that a game's length is proportional to it's value; both of which are fallacy I assure you. It is this reviewer's opinion that $10 dollars is a fair asking price, and if you're a fan of puzzles and charm then you can't go wrong with P.B. Winterbottom.

    Other reviews for Winterbottom (Xbox 360 Games Store)

      The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom Review 0

      This XBOX Live Arcade game has you assuming the role of PB Winterbottom a pie hungry thief whose only love in life is to steal and eat pies. You will be trying to capture a very elusive pie, but on the way you'll have to solve puzzle after puzzle to unlock other levels to get your closer to that pie.I  really like the graphical style they went with in this game. Almost entirely black and white with an old silent film type of feel to it. This is even further enforced with the mechanism of recordi...

      4 out of 4 found this review helpful.

      Winterbottom's Quest for Pie, Is an XBLA Treat you can't deny! 0

      The Misadventures of P.B Winterbottom is an Xbox Live Arcade game with some style. The silent-film look of the game is one of the great features of the game, alongside the music and interesting story. It involves P.B Winterbottom, a man on a mission to eat all the pies he can find, although this leads him into some sort of time portal which gives him the ability to clone himself in different ways. Each world is about 5-10 levels, and the rules of beating each level will change how you obtain pie...

      4 out of 5 found this review helpful.

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