Storm Boy The Game is one of the lightest book to game adaptations I’ve ever played. Aimed squarely at the young child market, it tells the story of a boy and his pelican and you control both of them across various short story segments and mini-games. The story is light, the gameplay is lighter and its an example of poor gameplay and mechanics being sold under the ‘its for kids’ banner.
Colin Thiele’s 1964 book ‘Storm Boy’ has some nice themes to it but when it comes to the game itself, the emotional pull isn’t there. That’s because none of the characters has any character – they aren’t given the screen time. Here each scene, or level, boils down to walking across a screen, reading a few lines of text and then doing an activity. The activities range from swimming in the sea, drawing in the sand, feeding pelicans fish, flying around in the sky and each one takes about 20 seconds to complete. Almost all of them have no fail state so there is no difficulty to speak of. The controls for most of the games are serviceable except for one where the wind is blowing the pelican around and it feels very counter-intuitive. The whole experience is over in 20 minutes with little reason to come back to it.
On the positive side, the graphics aren’t terrible and I enjoyed the warm art style – but that isn’t a five-pound game. I felt cheated of a story that I expected more from, bored and underwhelmed with bolt-on mini-games that served no purpose and ultimately deleted it from my PS4 after getting the platinum and that is a rarity for me.
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