Previews

E3 2009: Hands on with the innovative student developed and DSiWare-bound Reflections

Is this Portal for the DS?

E3 2009: Hands on with the innovative student developed and DSiWare-bound Reflections
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DSi
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Here's a story the Nintendo press machine should be getting into high gear about.

A group of students from the University of Southern California made a game - called Reflections - as a part of their final year course and it's going to be released via DSiWare through Konami. Now wasn't that what Nintendo's download-only service was supposed to be all about: innovation and new developers?

As you might expect, graphically the game isn't amazing but it's the gameplay where it really shines. As the title suggests, the platform puzzle works as the 2D sidescrolling environment in the DS' top screen is reflected on the bottom.

You control a character called Kirra, moving her though the level obstacles. And whatever moves you perform with one Kirra are matched by the other. The trick is that the environments top and bottom aren't exactly the same but have small differences. So if bottom screen Kirra's way is blocked, then top screen Kirra is blocked too.

In this way, you have to swap between characters to make your way through the level. The good news however is that if one version of Kirra is standing on firm ground, the other can be safely standing on thin air.

For this part of the game, the main goal and replayability comes from finishing levels as quickly as possible. There is also item collection. The twist on the reflection twist comes in the second half of the game with Shadow Kirra.

The reflective nature of the game remains, but now if one character is standing on thin air, she will fall. Hence the only way you can make your way through the level is because you can decouple the relative positions of the two. Each character still performs whatever movement the other does, but in a horizontally shifted location. You can resync their locations using sync points. In this way, the gameplay switches from platformer to more of a puzzle theme.

Explained in this way, it sounds fairly complex but Reflections plays really well and the actions quickly become intuitive.

You can see a video of how it all works out here.

While playing the game, we also caught up with one of its designers Henry Liu (pictured).

He explained about the development process, which saw 12 students, part from the game design and part from the game programming course at USC joining forces. Since completing the title - which won a mobile IGF award at GDC 2009 - four of the students have decided to take the plunge and form a full-time studio called Intrinsic Games, with the DSi version of Reflections as their first project.

In terms of the mechanics of a DSiWare release, Liu said he expected the game to retail at around 800 Nintendo Points ($8), although at this time, it's only being scheduled for North America. It should be out in July.

"We hope it will do well on DSiWare. There's certainly a lot of bang for your buck," he pointed out.

The game has a total of 30 levels, with playtime expected to be around two hours for the standard levels, plus the same again for the 'very difficult' bonus levels.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.