Evil Twin Hands-On

Evil Twin is about Cyprien, a little orphan who, just like Little Nemo, gets trapped in a completely fictional dreamland. But instead of a cute dream with flying beds and happy magical critters, Evil Twin' s dream world is a dark, gothic nightmare full of horrible creations that would make Little Nemo wet his pajamas. But Cyprien has one special ability that just might get him through his nightmares alive: At times he can turn into his evil twin - a super-powered alternate version of himself that harnesses evil powers and uses them against anyone it pleases.

Evil Twin is just about as dark and brooding a game as I have ever seen. Most of the levels I have seen use a very small amount of lighting, preferring to cast Cyprien in a world of shadows. When the precious lighting is used, it creates a very dynamic effect and lights up the surrounding area in an almost magical way. The graphics are clean and nicely detailed, and the characters themselves sport an animated quality very reminiscent of claymation.

The game is still in the early stages of development, so the version I played was pre-alpha. As such, the controls needed a lot of work. Several of the levels required lots of platform jumping. Unfortunately, I found that Cyprien' s jump was not exactly consistent. Sometimes he traveled halfway across the screen; sometimes he went straight up but not very far left or right. This made it difficult to plan jumps, and I spent most of my time playing the same few platforms over and over again. Also, I found that even when the game was laid out as a side scroller, I still had 3D movement - I could move to and fro on a platform in addition to left and right. Sometimes the platforms were staggered on a horizontal plane, so I had to jump diagonally left and fro to get to them. Unfortunately, with the current camera angles, making these jumps was pretty much impossible.

One of the cooler parts of the experience was when I managed to get far enough through a level to discover a cutscene. Even in this early stage, the cutscene was pretty complete. It showed Cyprien being towered over by a giant female spider. They spoke for a bit and the camera moved around both of them to show them in different dramatic angles, but the conversation was completely in French, so I missed exactly what they were saying. I did, however, get the impression that the voice acting in the game was somewhat decent, as both characters seemed to have just the right amount of passion in their voices.

Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to play any of the game as the evil twin - Super Cyprien. I have been told that playing as the evil twin is an awesome experience, as he glows in an eerie white light that really illuminates the shadowy world in which the game exists.

It' s too early to make any sort of concrete judgments, but Evil Twin sure does look nice. If the controls are smoothed out considerably, and if the plotline is as compelling as the developers make it seem, it could turn into a solid platformer. Also responsible for Rayman 2 is In Utero, who has already shown it can make an excellent platformer. Hopefully Evil Twin will be a worthy successor to the limbless one.