Adventure Boy

A few years ago at the place where I work, an email went around announcing the introduction of a new initiative, to be explained in detail later that day. It was called 'Blue Sky Thinking'.

All morning my colleagues and I speculated about what it might be. Some kind of bonus scheme, we supposed, or a more relaxed dress code. Nobody could agree on what was coming, but we were unanimous on one point: with a name like that, it had to be good.

When the time came, our line manager summoned us to his cubicle and made the following announcement: "Right, you horrible lot. Somebody has been picking his nose and wiping it on the wall above the urinals, so from now on there's no iPods, no talking, no internet, no newspapers on desks…" And so on.

Most would have characterised my manager's diatribe as something more along the lines of 'Dark Thunder Thinking' and certainly nothing to do with brainstorming (as it should have done). But then, some titles are just misleading.

And they don't come more misleading than Adventure Boy's. On the one hand, it's not an adventure game, and on the other, the main character isn't a boy. He's a fully-grown man called Willy Woodcliff, and he's the avatar in a platform title that introduces itself, with the good-natured witlessness of Richard Whitely, as a 'brand new old-fashioned game'.

Fundamentally a simple genre, over the years the platformer has evolved in a range of interesting ways: some games enable you to jump a little higher if you press the action button in mid-flight; some enable you to travel down pipes to secret worlds while others intermittently plunge you into the sea; some equip you with a variety of means and ways of dispatching your enemies; and many feature doors, keys, and puzzles to solve.

Adventure Boy features none of the above. It's possible to get an extra life from time to time, true, but aside from that this is the most unembellished platform experience you could hope to find. In evolutionary terms, if New Super Mario Bros is a chartered accountant and Spyro: A New Beginning is a 15th century blacksmith, Adventure Boy is a prehistoric shrew, foraging in videogame's dark undergrowth.

Which isn't to say that it's a bad game – just, as it freely admits, an old-fashioned one.

Anyway, Willy and his companion, Ms Lynn Blake, are searching for treasure in an African jungle when master criminal Dr Gustavo Fernandez Da Cruz kidnaps the latter in revenge for something the former has done in a previous episode. The object of the game is therefore to rescue Ms Blake, although you still get rewarded for collecting treasure along the way.

The levels are fairly small but the platforms are ranged high and low so that there's usually more than one way through – if you don't fancy taking on the pixel-perfect jump below you, simply attempt to leap over the patrolling tribesman above. Both will be tricky, though, because even if the action is neither fast nor mentally taxing, negotiating the stages often takes precision.

Although the variety of the levels is necessarily limited to jungles, caves, and ruins, the graphics are colourful and solidly cartoon-like in nature, while the music and sound effects are accomplished. Willy even cries out when you step on a trap or blunder into a spider.

But here's the thing. The jungle of Adventure Boy is populated by snakes, arachnids, piranhas, spike-shelled turtles, mummies, dinosaurs, and – far more dangerous than these – indigenous Africans with spears. After all, this is 'Zooloo Land.' Oh dear.

We're not sure whether professing to be 'old-fashioned' excuses the use of such stereotypes but we're sure of this: it doesn't make the game any better. Adventure Boy is still dull, drizzly, miserably mild, and shows little to no evidence of being the result of any blue sky thinking.